CONCORD \u2013 State taxes and fees were nearly 10 percent off the forecast last month, and the report raised the likelihood cigarette taxes will go up in mid-October.<\/p>\n
The total revenue was $101 million when $111 million had been expected.<\/p>\n
After two months, revenue is $11.6 million below forecast but $1.8 million more than had come in during the same period last year.<\/p>\n
August is one of the two, smallest months for state revenue in the state budget year that began July 1.<\/p>\n
Tourism-driven taxes on hotel rooms and restaurant meals, cigarettes, liquor and lottery sales all fell well below their forecast.<\/p>\n
The tobacco lobby convinced the Legislature to cancel an increase in the cigarette tax of 26 cents per pack if sales reached $50 million the first three months of this year.<\/p>\n
With one month left to go, only $32 million had come in and that’s 4 percent less than last year by this time.<\/p>\n
The state’s current tax is $1.08 and Massachusetts raised its own tax by $1 a pack last month.<\/p>\n
The only bright spot in the report came from the state’s two business taxes that brought in $12 million or $1.6 million more than had been expected. September is the first, significant barometer for revenue.<\/p>\n
Last month, Revenue Commissioner Phil Blatsos predicted that revenue would fall $100 million short of the year’s forecast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CONCORD \u2013 State taxes and fees were nearly 10 percent off the forecast last month, and the report raised the likelihood cigarette taxes will go up in mid-October. The total revenue was $101 million when $111 million had been expected. After two months, revenue is $11.6 million below forecast but $1.8 million more than had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-nh","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7026,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/7026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cnht.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}