On February 4, Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh issued a ruling that effectively cleared the path for 97 counties to place sweeping property tax caps on the ballot this April 7.
Not to be confused with the senior property tax freeze passed in 2023 (Senate Bill 190), this upcoming vote stems from the “stadium funding” law (Senate Bill 3) passed during the 2025 special session. In a compromise to secure legislative support to subsidize professional sports teams, nearly 100 rural and suburban counties are forced to vote on freezing or capping property tax growth for all homeowners, not just seniors.
The potential result is an economic canyon for local services.
As a member of my local school board, I see firsthand how districts across Missouri are being squeezed from both ends. The state is pushing to eliminate the individual income tax—having abolished the individual capital gains tax last year—which shrinks the state’s General Revenue pool that funds K-12 education through the Foundation Formula. Simultaneously, many counties are about to freeze the local property tax base that also funds local school districts. Meanwhile, dozens of other counties understandably want to sustain the property tax freeze for their seniors.
In the wake of Senate Bill 3 and Judge Limbaugh’s ruling, we face a scenario in the upcoming election where counties inadvertently starve their classrooms and fire districts to achieve needed tax relief. But Missourians should not have to choose between protecting homeowners and adequately funding public schools, which improve property values.
There’s a third path to reducing taxes on Missouri residents without the harmful tradeoffs. It would require the General Assembly to collect from the wealthiest sector of the modern economy: Big Tech.
It is time for a Missouri Data Asset Yield Tax.
This tax is appropriate because our economy has fundamentally changed. In this age of Artificial Intelligence, the value of public information has evaporated. Advanced AI models instantly ingest public data the moment it is available. Therefore, the remaining advantage is the ownership of proprietary data—unique, non-public information like the real-time location history, spending habits, and behavioral patterns of Missouri residents.
For companies like Meta (Facebook) and Google, this data is not a service record; it is inventory. It is harvested from our digital lives and used to power AI models that generate billions in revenue.
Consider that a Missouri-based manufacturer must pay business personal property tax on every piece of machinery, tooling, and equipment sitting in their facility—taxable operating assets assessed at 33.3% of their value. Meanwhile, a California-based data broker holds a digital inventory of millions of Missouri user profiles and pays zero property tax on it.
Critics may ask, “If taxing data inventory is such a goldmine, why hasn’t California or New York done it?”
The answer is that they cannot. But Missouri can.
Most state constitutions lack the ability to tax intangible property. However, Article X, Section 4(b) of the Missouri Constitution explicitly preserves the state’s right to tax the yield—the actual, auditable revenue generated—of intangible property (capped at 8%).
By taxing the yield, specifically the apportioned advertising revenue, the state bypasses the complex valuation obstacles that have plagued other attempts to tax digital assets. Because this data is continuously created, maintained, and monetized strictly through the interactions of Missouri residents, it possesses a “business situs” (legal home) here in Missouri.
If a major tech platform generates $200 a year in revenue from each of its 4 million Missouri users, that’s an $800 million yield. An 8% tax on that one company could generate $64 million annually for the state, which could backfill local school and emergency service funding.
Just as owning a bond generates a taxable yield, so could owning a proprietary Missouri data set. This approach has already been proven by our neighbors in Kansas, who use a similar structure (K.S.A. 12-1,101) to allow counties to tax the gross earnings of financial intangibles. If Kansas can do it for stocks, Missouri can do it for data.
For the General Assembly, this creates the revenue offset necessary to responsibly reduce the income tax without the threat of escalated sales taxes or defunding the Foundation Formula.
Timely for our modern age, Missouri should leverage its unique constitutional power to capture value growth in this digital economy. With local taxing districts facing the “Stadium Bill” property tax caps, the Governor’s priority of eliminating the income tax, the known hazards of raising sales taxes, and the existing senior tax freeze, lawmakers must allow Missouri voters to decide on stabilizing the burden and revenue of state and local taxes with a Data Asset Yield Tax
CPA and Member of the Ladue School District's Board of Education
