This past summer, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a law to kill the state’s capital gains tax. He was just getting started. Now, Kehoe and Republican lawmakers have their sights on doing away with the entire state income tax.

Great idea. Nine states – including three others from the Southeastern Conference (Florida, Tennessee, and Texas) – have no income tax. The map below shows where the nine no-income-tax states are. They are almost all highly prosperous.

The question is how would Missouri pay its bills without an income tax?

One plan would phase out the income tax of 4.7% over three to six years and cap state spending. That has been tried in other states, but so far no state has made it to zero this way.

We prefer the Laffer cold turkey solution: immediately eliminate the Missouri income tax (why wait?) and pay for this by broadening the sales tax base to include all of the more than 200 products and services that have been unwisely exempted from tax.

This approach makes everyone pay their fair share and supercharges the economy.