1993 State Fiscal Prospects

Download Special Report No. 7

Special Report No. 7

Executive Summary A new Tax Foundation survey of the 50 states reveals that new taxes in excess of $7.9 billion have been enacted or proposed for fiscal year 1993. Alter record tax increases of $17 billion in fiscal year 1992 and $10.3 billion in fiscal year 1991, the proposed FY’93 revenues will be the third largest increase since 1984. Three states, New York, Florida and Maryland, account for more than half of the total increase. New York has the largest tax increase on the drawing board — a plan to extract $1.6 billion in new revenue from a variety of measures, such as extending sunsetting provisions and increasing fees. Florida is contemplating $1.5 billion in new revenue, mostly from sales and business taxes. Maryland taxpayers, still adjusting to $90.1 million in new taxes from FY ’92, are preparing themselves for a hit almost ten times as large, $875 million enacted in April of this year.

Two symptoms of the nationwide recession, low personal income growth and sluggish personal consumption, continue to make a mockery of state revenue estimates. After last year’s substantial increases in individual and corporate income taxes and sales taxes, lawmakers are resorting to a variety of inventive revenue-raising measures: subjecting previously exempt items to sales tax, increasing existing fees and imposing new fees on new products and services, extending temporary tax increases, deferring tax relief legislation, accelerating tax collections, and strengthening audit and administrative enforcement activities. All told, lawmakers will add another $7.9 billion to state coffers, totaling a record $35 .2 billion in new revenues in the past three years, $12 .2 billion more than was added in the entire decade of the 1980s.