The Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City (Jason Hancock/Missouri Independent).
Missouri’s Republican legislators do a whole lot of grandstanding about being “pro-life,” but consistently refuse to put our money where their mouth is.
A budget is a statement of values. And our budget and two bills passed by the House say Missouri does not value having healthy and fed children.
One in seven Missouri children are food insecure, in part due to the state administering federal food benefits so poorly that a court ruled that Missouri is violating federal law.
Missouri ranked 40th in the nation in child health last year according to the Casey Foundation. This was based on metrics like our high rates of babies born with low-birth weight and our many uninsured children.
Missouri children visit the ER and are hospitalized for manageable conditions like asthma at high rates. We were making some progress on this problem, but now it is being exacerbated by the state dropping eligible children from Medicaid, causing them to go without medical care.
The state’s resource-starved administration of Medicaid has also caused pregnant women in Missouri to go without prenatal care. Additionally, we have a dire shortage of maternity care and our maternal mortality rate has long been terrible. Our infant mortality rate is higher than the national average and increasing.
Child care centers have shuttered because Missouri couldn’t manage to administer federal funds owed until recently. Missouri consistently ranks among the worst states for early childhood education.
These are problems that the legislature needs to address. That takes money. This mismanaged state has no business further reducing revenues.
And yet, the House just passed a purportedly “pro-life” bill that would give more tax credits for unregulated anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers.” We already have tens of millions of Missouri tax dollars going to these organizations known to pressure and mislead women into having babies that the state will abandon once born.
Giving millions of dollars away with next to no oversight when we can’t even properly administer federal dollars meant to feed our kids is unconscionable. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the legislature’s broader efforts to further reduce taxes for the well off.
According to the Missouri Budget Project, Missouri currently ranks close to last among the states for the amount of revenue it collects and spends per person. Our income tax rate has gone from 6% in 2015 to 4.7% this year, well below the national average of 6.22% in states with income taxes. Missouri has the second lowest corporate tax rate in the nation at 4%.
Missouri’s low income tax and high state and local sales taxes mean that struggling families taxed on their necessities pay a higher percentage of their income to fund the state than the wealthy do.
And yet our Republican legislators demonstrate a serious lack of concern about the way the state is failing our children.
They just passed a bill in the House that would further lower the income and corporate tax rates and eliminate the capital gains tax, decreasing state revenue by at least $1.3 billion.
Our legislators are doing this at a moment when we need them to be protecting us from the suffering that will flow from President Trump and Elon Musk’s illegal withholding of funds owed to Missouri’s people and institutions, and congressional Republicans’ plan to fund tax cuts for the rich by gutting Medicaid–which covers one in five Missourians and almost 40% of Missouri children.
But neither our state nor our federal Republican representatives are fighting to protect food and medical care for our kids.
Missouri U.S. Reps. Mark Alford, Sam Graves, Ann Wagner, Jason Smith, Bob Onder and Eric Burlison all voted for a House budget proposal directing $880 billion in Medicaid cuts over 10 years. If those cuts are made to Medicaid expansion, Missouri will have to foot the bill rather than drop coverage because voters put expansion in our constitution via ballot initiative.
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, in a surprising act of advocating for Missourians, introduced an amendment that would restrict cuts to Medicaid. However, he has endorsed work requirements, which can sound reasonable, but are actually just a backdoor way to cut Medicaid.
It’s a way to kick people off their health insurance because they can’t work, typically because they are ill, can’t find a job, or don’t have childcare.
Work requirements don’t increase employment. What they do is complicate the eligibility process–something Missouri has already made a spectacular mess of–causing those who struggle to navigate the red tape to lose coverage. An estimated 445,000 Missourians would be at risk of losing their insurance.
Missouri is not functioning well enough to meet the basic needs of its children and their caregivers. There’s nothing “pro-life” about our legislators signing on to make things worse.