State tax revenues increased 5.8% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.
After inflation these revenues were up 4.7% from a year earlier. The institute calculates the 5.8% and 4.7% increases before the effects of legislated changes in tax rates.
Rockefeller Institute analysts Lucy Dadayan and Donald Boyd
State tax revenues in early 2014 had been depressed by decisions by high income taxpayers to accelerate capital gains earnings to avoid federal tax increases in 2013, they wrote.
However, adjusted for inflation, state tax receipts were 9.3% higher in the first quarter of 2015 than in the same quarter of 2008, which was the first full quarter of the Great Recession, before state tax revenues began to contract.
According to Dadayan and Boyd, state taxes grew fastest in first quarter of 2015 from a year earlier in the Great Lakes regions, rising 7.7%. The slowest growth, 3.2%, was in the Mid-Atlantic region. In the same period, individual income tax revenues grew by 7.1%, corporate income tax revenues by 3.3%, sales tax revenues by 5.2%, and motor fuel tax revenues by 4.4%.
The analysts also report that the four-quarter moving average of inflation-adjusted revenue of the four largest types of local taxes increased 1% in the first quarter of 2015, from a year earlier. "Local tax collections from major sources have been relatively weak by historical standards over the last five years due in part to the lagged impact of falling housing prices on property tax collections," Dadayan and Boyd wrote.
