As bad as Colorado’s economy has been, national tax-collection data show that it’s just as bad, if not worse, just about everywhere else.
A report released Friday by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, a research arm of the State University of New York at Albany, shows that nationally, state tax collections declined in the first quarter of 2009 by 11.7 percent, the largest single-quarter drop in the 46 years that such tax statistics have been collected. Tax collections fell in 47 states, the report said.
Early figures for the second quarter of 2009 show that things appeared to be getting worse, the report said, with a nearly 20 percent total decline in state tax collections. Initial figures predict that for states’ 2009 fiscal year, total taxes will be down 8 percent, personal income taxes down 13 percent and sales taxes down 5 percent, the report said.
In Colorado, revenue to the state’s general fund — the main pot of money that funds state government operations and into which most state taxes go — fell 15.9 percent in the first quarter of 2009, mirroring the national downward economic spiral during those months.
And for the fiscal year that ended in June, economists predict that the state’s general fund will be down 13.7 percent over the previous year.
Total sales-tax collections of $1.9 billion were 8.3 percent lower than the previous year, an indicator of drastically altered spending habits, said Natalie Mullis, chief economist for the state’s Legislative Council.
“That really tells you what the consumer is going through,” Mullis said. “Sales taxes are not usually that variable. That tells you the consumer has gone through a substantial change in how they operate their household.”
Meanwhile, the state’s personal-income-tax collections of $4.4 billion were down 13.1 percent from the previous year. Corporate income taxes, which are highly volatile from year to year, totaled $325.4 million, a 35.4 percent plunge from the year before.
Mullis said one of the few encouraging numbers from the state’s revenue collections is that its withholding- tax collections of $3.9 billion for the fiscal year ended in June were only 0.4 percent lower than the year before. That indicates that even with the state having lost nearly 100,000 jobs over the last year, current employment is still relatively strong in Colorado, she said.
“I think we’re taking a beating, but the withholding numbers indicate that there’s something that’s holding up,” Mullis said.
Tim Hoover: 303-954-1626 or thoover@denverpost.com
Grim figures
Colorado’s tax collections for the year that ended in June were down:
Sales taxes: -8.3 percent
Personal income taxes: -13.1 percent
Corporate income taxes: -35.4 percent
