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Missouri's income figures for August hold good and bad news

St. Louis Public Radio | By Jo Mannies
Published September 2, 2016 at 4:18 PM CDT
dleafy | sxc.hu

Missouri state government’s income collections were down in August, but state Budget Director Dan Haug says it’s too early to panic.

A key reason for the decline is that August 2015’s income collections — particularly for the sales tax — were unusually high.

“We were just up against a really good month last year,’’ Haug said Friday. He added that his department will be monitoring state income collections in September closely, because by then state government will have completed a quarter of this fiscal year (FY2017).

Credit dleafy | sxc.hu

Overall, the state’s general revenue income dropped 1.4 percent in August, compared to a year ago. But because July’s numbers were strong, the fiscal-year-to-date collections are up about 2 percent.

Sales tax collections in Missouri in August were down 4.3 percent compared to a year ago, despite the usual spark of back-to-school purchases.

But Haug said he was particularly pleased with the state’s individual income tax collections in August, which were up 5.4 percent compared to a year ago.

That means more Missourians are working, or getting higher pay, Haug said. “That’s good news and speaks to an underlying strength in the Missouri economy and our revenues going forward.”

Here’s the August financial breakdown:

GROSS COLLECTIONS BY TAX TYPE

Individual income tax collections

Increased 5.6 percent for the year, from $907.3 million last year to $958.0 million this year.

Increased 5.4 percent for the month.

Sales and use tax collections

Decreased 0.82 percent for the year from $361.1 million last year to $358.1 million this year.

Decreased 4.3 percent for the month.

Corporate income and corporate franchise tax collections

Decreased 28.7 percent for the year, from $34.0 million last year to $24.3 million this year.

Decreased 16.5 percent for the month.

All other collections

Decreased 36.0 percent for the year, from $64.0 million last year to $41.0 million this year.

Decreased 28.6 percent for the month.

Refunds

Decreased 9.7 percent for the year, from $108.2 million last year to $97.7 million this year.

Increased 33.9 percent for the month.

Copyright 2016 St. Louis Public Radio
Jo Mannies
Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.
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