Texans Close their Wallets, Houston’s Economy Gets Crushed
by Wolf Richter
WolfStreet.com
Dec 7, 2016
It’s not just the oil bust.
Sales tax collections in Texas in November fell 2.7% compared to November 2015 and are down 5.9% year-to-date, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. And they’re down 2.2% from collections in November 2014, and down 0.14% year-to-date compared to the same period in 2014.
This is the first time since the depth of the Financial Crisis that year-to-date collections are lower than they’d been a year earlier, and even two years earlier.
What was at first expected to be just a blip in the data when it appeared in June 2015 – the first year-over-year decline in monthly sales tax collections since the Financial Crisis – has turned into the end of the great Texas retail boom.
This chart shows sales tax collections for 2014 (green), 2015 (blue), and 2016 (red). The sales tax data, researched and complied by “David in Texas,” is not seasonally adjusted, hence the strong fluctuations. Sales tax collections lag sales by one month; hence, collections reported in November were for sales in October:
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