The State-Led Sound Money Countdown(Part One): 45 Out of 50

Here’s your scoreboard.

Forty-five out of fifty U.S. states have now removed sales taxes on gold and silver. More than a dozen have formally declared precious metals to be legal tender. Several are physically stockpiling gold bars in state-run vaults. And the 2026 legislative season isn’t even over yet.

The sound money movement is no longer a fringe movement led by the guys in the “End the Fed” t-shirts.

The latest entry is Kansas, where the legislature just passed House Bill 2515, declaring gold and silver coin and bullion to be legal tender and exempting them from state income tax, sales tax, and property tax. The bill is sitting on Governor Laura Kelly’s desk. Republican Sen. Michael Murphy, who spent three years pushing the legislation, sold his colleagues on the idea by pointing out that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was actually a monetary policy allegory.

The Yellow Brick Road? The gold standard.

Dorothy’s slippers (silver in the book, ruby in the movie)? The free-silver movement.

The Emerald City? Washington, D.C., and its undying preference for paper money.

A Kansas state senator standing on the chamber floor explaining the monetary symbolism of a children’s book. Signs of the times, I guess.

What’s Happened Within the First Four Months of 2026

What makes Kansas noteworthy isn’t Kansas itself. It’s the number of States promoting sound money in the first four months of 2026:

Those are the highlights…

The Sound Money Defense League reports that over 60 pro-sound-money bills were introduced across 27 states in recent legislative sessions. More than half the country is actively working to restore gold and silver to their constitutional role.

Twenty-seven states.

The constitutional argument they don’t want you to remember

Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution reads: “No state shall make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

For over a century, that clause was treated like a quaint relic, the monetary equivalent of a powdered wig. Nobody paid attention because the federal government had long since severed the dollar’s connection to gold (Nixon, 1971, the original sin) and the states went along with it.

Now, state after state is dusting off that clause and saying: actually, the Founders had a point. They wrote it because they had lived through the hyperinflation of the Continental dollar and understood exactly what happens when governments print money without constraint. “Not worth a Continental” was the 18th-century version of “your purchasing power is being destroyed and nobody in charge cares.”

The states passing these laws aren’t doing something radical. That was already done…

Abandoning sound money was the radical act. What we’re watching now is a slow, state-by-state correction.

The holdouts are the real story

Forty-five states have figured this out. Which raises the obvious question: what’s wrong with the other five?

The holdout list: Maine, Vermont, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Maryland. And they recently got company. Washington state reversed its precious metals sales tax exemption as of January 1, 2026. Maryland did the same thing in mid-2025. These states are actually moving backward while the rest of the country moves forward.

Think about what these states are actually doing. If you walk into a coin shop in Portland, Maine, and exchange fifty Federal Reserve notes for an ounce of silver, the state government wants a cut of that transaction. You’re exchanging one form of money for another, and they’re taxing you for it. Imagine if a grocery clerk broke a five-dollar bill and the government charged you a 35-cent sales tax for the privilege.

That’s what these states are doing to their citizens. They’re penalizing people for the act of protecting themselves against the very inflation that their own federal government is creating.

Meanwhile, New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is reportedly looking at ways to increase taxation on gold and silver. Because of course he is. The instinct of the political class, when faced with citizens trying to opt out of a failing monetary system, is never to fix the system. It’s to punish the people who noticed.

Why all roads lead here

The beauty of the sound money trend is that it doesn’t require you to predict exactly how the current mess resolves.

Consider the possibilities:

Interest rates stay elevated? Government debt service costs explode, the fiscal crisis deepens, and gold rises as a safe haven. States that removed tax barriers on precious metals look prescient.

The Fed cuts rates to bail out the bond market? Inflation rips higher, dollar purchasing power craters, and gold holders are the last ones standing. States that removed barriers win again.

Some kind of monetary reset, whether it’s CBDCs, a new international arrangement, or just a slow-motion currency crisis? The states that positioned their citizens to hold real assets outside the paper system got there first.

Every scenario rewards the states that acted. And, every scenario punishes the ones that didn’t. The specific path is unknowable, but the destination is fixed. And increasingly, state legislators from Topeka to Tallahassee to Austin seem to understand this.

When governments hedge against their own currency

Here’s the detail that should keep the Federal Reserve’s board of governors up at night. Not only is it easier for citizens to own gold and silver. Several states are now buying gold themselves.

Wyoming established a $10 million state gold reserve. Utah has approximately $178 million in gold sitting in a privately operated vault. The Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the Ohio Police and Fire Pension Fund each hold about $1 billion in gold. These aren’t preppers or newsletter writers (no offense to newsletter writers). These are state treasurers and pension fund fiduciaries. They have a legal obligation to protect the assets in their care. And they’re looking at the U.S. dollar, looking at the debt trajectory, and deciding they need a hedge.

So, our scoreboard reads 45 to 5.

The momentum is entirely one-directional…

For stackers, the legislative tailwind just keeps getting stronger. You can bet on it picking up.

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