Canary in the Coal Mine

Have you lost your job in the last year? I really am sorry if you have, and I sincerely hope you have found work since then.

If you're like me and you've been blessed enough not to have lost your job, you probably still know a few people who have. But for many of us who have remained employed during this recession, I think it is all too easy to know emperically that a problem exists but to not really believe it deep down. No amount of hype on TV or in print can really bring home the fact that people are flat out LOOSING THEIR JOBS as a result of the sad state of the economy right now.

I'm not sure one more piece of scary information will help make this whole deal real for anyone else, but I heard a statistic recently that kind of jumped out at me. In my home state of Missouri, tax revenue (resulting from income taxes, corporate taxes and sales taxes) fell 9.1% during the last year.

That's real, and that's not small potatoes, folks. That's up in the low billions of dollars.

That's a real drop in taxes collected from what people earn (7.6%), because so many people aren't working, and many of those who are still employed have seen their incomes flatline or even decline in the last year. That's a real drop in taxes on companies (~5%) that aren't doing as much business as they did in previous years. And that's a real drop in taxes collected at the cash register (~5%) as people spend less of what they earn.

For some reason, knowing that my state's revenues have dropped by close to 10% in the past year somehow makes the recession more real to me. In a weird way, tax revenues are like the canary in the coal mine. . . a second-hand indicator of the health (or sickness) of its surroundings.

I think there's something bad in the air.

http://www.connectmidmissouri.com/news/story.aspx?id=478120