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Central Illinois Gazette

More bad news for state of Illinois

Posted by: Tom Kacich

Thursday, February 5, 2009 8:18 AM

A day after Illinois Comptroller Dan Hyners said that the state may have as much as a $9 billion budget deficit (still not as bad as California or New York), the Legislature's Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability reported that tax revenue to the state was way off in January.

The personal income tax -- the No. 1 revenue source — was down by 6.3 percent.

The corporate income tax was off by 17.4 percent.

The sales tax -- a revenue source that also is crucial to local government -- was down by 8.2 percent.

Even lottery sales were off (29.2 percent).

For some odd reason (the commission suggested it might have to do with December revenues being counted in January), riverboat gambling revenues were up 28 percent even though they had been down in previous months (and are down 26 percent for the year so far).

The grand total for January: state source revenues were down 10.4 percent (or $265 million). Carry that out over a year and you've got an enormous revenue shortfall of more than $3 billion.

So far in the current fiscal year (whcih started July 1), tax revenue to the state of Illinois is down by about 5 percent. So you can see that the siatuation has been worseen ing over time. There's no reason to believe that February, given the growing number of job layoffs, will be better.