Time to dive into sales taxes again. I do this because the Lampasas Economic Dunces Club does a lot of crowing about how they keep going up – implying that THEY have something to do with this. LOL.
In reality, the entire state of Texas has seen an explosion in sales tax receipts and the City of Lampasas actually TRAILS this trend badly.
For the months of February and March, the state of Texas gave two numbers – adjusted and unadjusted. This is due to winter storm Uri in 2021, which caused a disruption in receipts. I used the LOWER number just to be conservative. The state STILL stomped our numbers.
Remember: headline inflation during this period is around 8 or 9% and the TRUE inflation numbers are likely closer to 12 or 15%. If sales tax gains are up 8% but inflation is 14%, you are actually doing quite poorly.
As you can see, there is only ONE MONTH this year where Lampasas exceeded the trend for the entire state: May. In all likelihood, our May number was tainted by something being pulled forward from July – seeing as how July collapsed massively YoY (MINUS 7%).
The August numbers for Lampasas will be out in a week or so. We shall see.
BONUS DATA:
The state of Texas said recently that sales tax receipts have jumped 19.3% for the latest fiscal year (9/1/21 through 8/31/22).
In the latest LEDC packet, we learned that sales tax receipts are running 9.14% higher year-to-date (unclear if that means FISCAL year-to-date or CALENDAR year-to-date) – see page 33.
While it is not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison, we see that the City of Lampasas also lags badly here as well by 10 percentage points – barely matching inflation.