You have to admire the timing on this.
Texas collected $2.5 billion less in taxes in the 2010 fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, than the previous year, state Comptroller Susan Combs said in a new cash report.
The tax collections were nearly $2 billion less than Combs predicted a year ago when she certified the two-year budget (see Table 16).
Specifically, we’re talking about the business margins tax, which was supposed to pay for those ginormous property tax cuts from 2006.
As Comptroller Susan Combs, the chair of the task force, acknowledged: “There is no cure in this report for the budget.”
According to the report, $3.9 billion was collected in the past fiscal year when $6.4 billion was expected — a $2.5 billion gap.
Of that difference, state officials attributed about $1 billion to the continuing recession and the other $1.5 billion to businesses paying less than expected.
State Sen. Kirk Watson, an Austin Democrat who is one of 21 members of the task force, said the dilemma of those short collections highlights why the state needs to reform its budget process from top to bottom.
“For some time, we as a state have masked structural deficits in our budget in recent years and it’s time we stopped doing that,” he said. “We’re going to find ourselves digging the state deeper and deeper into a hole.”
Have fun dealing with that, and with the $25 billion deficit that happened on Rick Perry’s watch, all you Republicans.