So here we are in the midst of a 'robust retail recovery', which unfortunately has yet to be manifested in the state sales tax receipts. Unfortunately, the most authoritative source of data there is provided quarterly and that at a modest lag...
So here we have a plot of the year over year change of 3 month moving average of retail sales ex-autos (RSFSXMV 3 mo MA) courtesy of the FRB FRED, and the year over year change in quarterly state sales tax receipts courtesy of the Rockefeller Institute of Government - if anyone can get the full time series of their data that would be great, but the current data set is limited to their most recent publication.
What the data set shows is the two curves as lines, and the faint green bars are the variance between the two. The average variance is -2.0% over the time period of the plot, and the most recent observation for 4Q2009 is -2.1%. Of interest is a quarterly breakout of the impacts of tax rate increases on total sales tax revenues, please post any information available in comments.
Technical notes: The RSFSXMV series is monthly, and a rolling 3 month cumulative total and the annual difference is calculated. The year over year change in quarterly state sales taxes are taken as is from the Rockefeller Institute, and then the monthly positions are a linear interpolation between those observations. The observed values were placed in the middle month of each quarter. [NB: Hat tip to josap who got me to re-examine my plot and so find a calculation bust!]
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