On August 17, Andy Biggs posted a video of himself sitting in a car at a gas station, making his pitch to Arizona voters:
"I want to eliminate the state income tax and without raising any other taxes. That's where I am."
Two things about that sentence deserve a closer look. The first is the math. The second is the gas station.
The $6 billion hole
Arizona's income tax brings in almost $6 billion a year — about one-third of the entire state budget, 12News reported.
Biggs has been making this pledge since the night he won the Republican primary on July 21. He has not presented a full plan. What he has said is that he'd do it "incrementally," and that the replacement money would come from three places:
- eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" in the state's Medicaid program
- "streamlining government"
- and, per a spokesman, "better utilization of state resources like land and minerals"
That is a third of a state budget being covered by two slogans and some mining rights.
David Lujan, who runs the Arizona Center for Economic Progress and served in the Legislature alongside Biggs, was blunt:
"It's not a plan. It's really just a tax shift to everyday Arizonans."
"You're going to have to fill that gap someplace. It's either going to come from cuts to schools and public safety or you're going to have to shift the tax cut to somewhere else, and it's most likely going to be an increase in the sales tax."
What happens to your city
Here's the part that doesn't fit in a gas-station video.
Arizona's income tax funds state shared revenue — the checks the state writes to cities and towns. Take away the income tax and you take away the checks.
Dallin Overstreet, an independent public finance analyst, estimates Arizona cities would lose $900 million a year:
"Eliminate the income tax and you eliminate the largest slice of the checks that fund municipal police, fire, and streets, unless the state backfills them."
Note the last four words. If the state does backfill them, the $6 billion hole gets bigger, not smaller.
And if Arizona tried to replace all that lost revenue through sales taxes, Overstreet's analysis finds the state would end up with the highest sales tax rates in the country. Sales taxes hit low- and middle-income families hardest, because they spend a larger share of what they earn.
So the "no other taxes" promise runs into a wall: either services get cut, or somebody's taxes go up. There is no third door.
Who actually gets the money
Even if the plan worked exactly as advertised, it wouldn't work for most Arizonans.
According to estimates from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, with no state income tax:
| Household income | Tax cut |
|---|---|
| $65,000 | $730 |
| $450,000 | $7,500 |
A household making seven times as much gets a cut ten times as large. That's not an accident of the design — it's what happens when you eliminate a tax that scales with income and lean on one that doesn't.
The one-way ratchet
Lujan raised a point Arizona voters should sit with, because it outlasts any one governor.
In Arizona, a simple majority of the Legislature can cut taxes. Raising them requires a 75% supermajority.
"If this turns out to be a mistake, which I think it will be, it is a very difficult mistake to erase."
Repeal the income tax and you have effectively written a permanent, one-third-smaller state budget into Arizona law. Schools, universities, public safety and the shared revenue that keeps cities solvent would be competing over what's left, more or less forever, because putting the tax back would need a supermajority that essentially never exists.
About that gas station
Biggs chose to film his affordability message at a gas station. In the video he claimed Gov. Katie Hobbs "wants to double your gas taxes."
That refers to a bill Hobbs cosponsored eight years ago as a state senator, which would have raised Arizona's gas tax from 18 cents to 36 cents a gallon to maintain highways. It never got a hearing.
Meanwhile, the actual price on the sign behind him: according to AAA Arizona, unleaded in Phoenix averaged $4.48 on August 17 — more than a dollar a gallon higher than a year earlier, driven up by President Trump's war in Iran.
Biggs picked a backdrop that documents a real, current price increase Arizonans are paying right now, in order to attack an eight-year-old bill that never received a hearing.
The federal version of the same idea
This isn't a new instinct for Biggs. In Congress, he cosponsored the "Fair Tax Act," which would abolish the federal income tax and replace it with a 23% national consumption tax — a bill that has been introduced in every Congress for more than 25 years and has never gone anywhere.
The difference is that in Washington the idea was symbolic. As governor of Arizona, with a Republican Legislature, it wouldn't be.
The rest of the record
Biggs spent 14 years in the Arizona Legislature, rising to Senate president, then 10 years in Congress. Arizonans have a long record to judge:
- Arizona doctors have publicly warned voters about his health care record.
- He tried to ban abortion nationwide, and now wants to govern a state whose voters approved abortion rights.
- The Republican who wrote a bill to rein in abusive local police in Colorado City says Biggs killed it: "Women and children suffered three years longer because he protected the bad guys."
What Arizona should ask
The question isn't whether Arizonans would like to pay less tax. Of course they would.
The question is the one 12News put in its headline and Biggs still hasn't answered: how would he cover the $6 billion hole?
Until there's an answer, "eliminate the income tax without raising any other taxes" isn't a plan. It's a sentence.
Arizona deserves a governor who shows the arithmetic before asking for the job.
Source
Andy Biggs pledges to repeal Arizona income tax. How would he cover the $6 billion hole? — 12News (KPNX), August 2026.
