Jimmy Morris owns a small business selling home school supplies, and he also works as a roofer in his father's business in Joplin, Missouri.

Too often, Missouri's tax policy has focused on one industry, or even one company. With tax credits and tax abatement, lawmakers have tried to woo single businesses they think will bring lots of jobs to the state.

It's a bad bet to put all our tax relief into one business or industry. After the terms of the tax credit is over, businesses often begin to look for other "deals" and take those jobs to another state that will give them a break. And small businesses accounted for 64% of new jobs between 1993 and 2008: so ignoring the needs of small businesses, or only focusing on attracting large firms to Missouri will keep us from growing nearly as much as we can.

The Missouri Jobs and Prosperity Act (SJR29) takes the potential of small businesses seriously. By eliminating Missouri's state income tax, every single small business (and large business!) gets a break, and every single business, large or small, that is considering moving to Missouri gets an incentive to open up shop in Missouri. We will be rewarding small business owners, entrepreneurs, and honestly growing jobs in every industry. It sets Missouri up to immediately be attractive to emerging industries. It gives Missouri small businesses the boost they need to grow and create jobs in every neighborhood, in every town.

Some more facts about small businesses from the SBA:

Small firms:
• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic
product (GDP).
• Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced
30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.