Gov. Jay Nixon used one of the St. Louis business community’s new pet issues Thursday to press for its support on a big political fight he’s got brewing.
About halfway through a 12-minute lunchtime speech to the St. Louis Regional Chamber — after name-checking a string of corporate expansions in the region, chest-thumping about Missouri’s low unemployment rate and touting a series of small tax cuts — Nixon started praising the Chamber’s recently launched push to boost the share of people with college degrees in St. Louis.
“As you have said, no accomplishment will be more important to our future economic viability,” Nixon told the room full of Chamber members. “I could not agree more.”
And that, Nixon said, is why those same Chamber leaders should support his veto of an income tax cut passed by the General Assembly in May. The measure, which would lower both personal income tax by a half-point and corporate income taxes by 3 percentage points over a decade, would blow an $800 million hole in Missouri’s budget, Nixon said. That is more than the state spends on “every single one of our public two- and four-year colleges, combined.”
“Members of the General Assembly can either support (the tax cut) or they can support education,” he said. “They cannot do both.”
Nixon is stumping for support ahead of a September veto session that will likely decide the tax cut issue. Supporters of the cut, including some statewide business groups, say it will make Missouri’s economy more competitive, especially against neighboring Kansas, where lawmakers passed a sharper income tax reduction last year. They’re joined by billionaire free-marketeer Rex Sinquefield, who has donated $2.3 million just this month to help finance a PR blitz that will urge lawmakers to override Nixon’s veto.
The issue has been a hot button all year in Jefferson City and in Kansas City, where a number of companies have jumped the border to Kansas. But St. Louis-area business groups have largely stayed out of the fray. The Regional Chamber did not take a formal position on the tax cut during the legislative session, and that stance has not changed, spokesman Gary Broome said Thursday.
Nixon is trying to change that, to pull them into the game on his side of the field. Even if St. Louis’ corporate titans don’t stand up for the veto, he said after the speech, he’s confident it will stand. No matter how much Sinquefield spends.
“If it’s one guy against 6 million Missourians,” Nixon said, “I like our side.”
