When Pathfinder Health Innovations decided to flee Kansas for neighboring Missouri, CEO Jeff Blackwood minced no words in assigning blame.

“It’s not so much that I’m moving the company to Missouri as I’m moving it away from Kansas,” CEO Jeff Blackwood wrote on his company’s blog this week.

Pathfinder, a privately held software company whose customers are autism-therapy centers, is tiny — it employs only 23 people — so Blackwood, a self-described political independent, can afford to be vocal, unlike critics at larger companies. But even by those standards, the lengthy open letter stands out.

He described the policies of Gov. Sam Brownback as a test case for trickle-down economics. And “nowhere has there been as dramatic a failure of government,” he added.

When Kansas enacted the largest income-tax cut in U.S. state history in 2012, officials said it would attract people and jobs to Kansas and that economic growth would generate enough new revenue to pay for the cuts. Instead, the state is facing budget shortfalls — totals in 11 of the past 12 months have fallen short of the state’s own projections — and the economy actually shrank in three of four quarters last year. Credit downgrades loom.

In his blog, Blackwood acknowledged that his company taxes are a tiny amount for the state but wrote: “I can’t, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most needs, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they’re simply a tax burden that should be ignored.”

State policies are hurting the developmentally disabled and those who rely on Medicaid as well as undermining the state’s public schools, he said.

Read:Why conservatives should call this big tax cut unfair

Blackwood said the company started in Kansas in 2010 in part because of state policies that made it attractive to do so, including a generous tax credit for angel investors. Today, those investors can form LLCs and avoid all state income taxes.

It’s moving about 10 miles away, to Kansas City, Mo., because it needs more room for its growing staff. Tax incentives from Missouri, he said, are a minor consideration. There’s also “a motivation of conscience.”

And there’s another message for conservative Republicans: Taxes, he told MarketWatch, aren’t the biggest impact on his business. More important is whether his customers can afford his product — and autism centers in Kansas no longer can because of state budget policies.