One man + a billion dollars = repeal of the City’s earnings tax – city services.
It is an equation that the residents in St. Louis and Kansas City absolutely must figure out before it’s too late.
A Think Before You Ink Campaign is underway to educate unsuspecting voters about Rex’s trick to get signatures for a ballot initiative that would repeal the E-tax.
Rex Sinquefield is no stranger to St. Louis politricks, but his latest solo act could be disastrous for the state. Rex is trying to repeal the E-tax that currently provides 1/3 of the City’s revenues. It would mean a $20 million shortfall in the current budget and more than $45 million in next year’s budget.
Those funds help to provide essential city services that are already being threatened due to overall budget deficits currently facing our city, like most urban cities.
Who is Rex Sinquefield? He is a wealthy, conservative businessman who decided to come back to Missouri to retire after being away for 35 years. Lucky us.
Sinquefield is best known for starting 100 separate Political Action Committees (PACs) to bypass legal limits on individual donations to political campaigns. This allows him maximum influence on his pet projects like school vouchers, tax reform to favor the corporate citizen and so on. He also established the Show-Me Institute, a so-called think tank that pays for research studies into issues dear to Sinquefield.
As a billionaire, you can buy lots of things, people and places. The Missouri Citizen Education Fund did a report on Rex a couple of years ago entitled Rex Sinquefield: Power of the Purse. The report shows how Rex paid to influence the Legislature regarding campaign contribution limits and private school vouchers. The report included a chart of 43 state legislators who cashed in their votes for Rex’s legislation to repeal finance limits. So if you had wondered what happened to the state law that capped contributions to help level the playing field, now you know.
Rex’s influence extends beyond the electoral arena. He has passed out dollars in the arts community as well as in the social services arena. He has effectively muzzled potential voices to oppose his earnings tax take-all by shoving dollars in their mouths and duct-taping them shut.
Rex and his hired petitioners (mainly from out-of-state) have until May 2 to secure the signatures required to get the repeal initiative on the ballot. A coalition of groups led by Missouri Jobs with Justice has been in action where sightings of petitioners have been noted. It is a coalition similar to the one that beat back Ward Connelly’s anti-affirmation ballot initiative two years ago. The goal, again, is to get voters to “decline to sign” the petitions.
This is a show-down between big money and effective organizing. Word on the street is that Rex has hired a company in India to double-check addresses and signatures against the voter lists so that they don’t come up short on legitimate voters. Supposedly the company is working 24-7 so that results are immediate, enabling them to know before deadline if they need to go back into a particular area to get more signatures. This kind of setup is an under-funded organizer’s dream!
Rex is a name commonly given to a dog, but it seems like Rex thinks he can treat everyone else like a dog cause he has money: “Sit!” “Heel!” “Roll over!” Missourians cannot let one rich man change an entire state into his empire.
Sinquefield once told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he wants to “make Missouri a better place … and that he has no secret agenda.” He’s audacious enough to announce his moves because he thinks he’s unstoppable. Whether his agenda can make Missouri a better place is highly debatable.