Here’s a budget update you won’t get from Hartford. Tax revenue this fiscal year will be down from the already drastically reduced projections issued just a month ago.

Back on May 1st, state budget masters reduced projected Connecticut state individual income tax revenue in two key categories by $2.0 billion over four years, including a half billion-dollar reduction for this fiscal year with only two months to go at that time.
A half billion-dollar annual reduction is a big reduction when total general fund tax revenue will average about $23 billion per year over the four years. For the current fiscal year, this represents not only a big reduction, but a big miss if you already have 9 to 10 months of actual data in hand. The tea leaves could and should have been read months earlier.
Even so, the big miss this year is actually going to be much bigger. The revised projections were for gross tax receipts. Yet, refunds have skyrocketed this fiscal year. As a result, net individual income tax receipts for Estimates & Finals (E&F) and the Pass-through Entity Tax (PET) are down much more than a half billion dollars.