April 2021 became the ninth consecutive month that the state of Florida exceeded its expected tax revenue collections, with 56% of the total revenue gain coming from sales-tax collections.
Sales-tax revenue accounted for $2.7993 billion, which is 19% or $447.6 million more than the estimated projection of approximately $2.3516 billion that was established by the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research (EDR) at the General Revenue Estimating Conference.
According to the monthly revenue report released by the EDR on June 4, the revenue overage in April is “by far the greatest overage since the pandemic began in the 2020 calendar year.” The EDR also noted that the numbers shown in the recent report reflect a $913.1 million or 48.4% increase in sales-tax revenue compared to the numbers recorded in April 2020 when the pandemic was in full swing.
Sales-tax is divided into six categories; Consumer Nondurables (food, beverage, gas, clothes, etc.), Tourism, Automobiles, Other Durables (appliances, electronics, tools, jewelry, etc.), Building, and Business, all of which exceeded the projected revenue for its category by at least 10%. The Automobiles category surpassed projections by 33.8%, followed by Other Durables at 30.2%, Consumer Nondurables at 16.8%, Building at 13.1%, Tourism at 12.1%, and Business at 10.3%.
The EDR further stated in the report that the increased numbers are due to “activity that largely occurred in March, which continued to benefit from the most recent round of stimulus checks to households, redirected spending from the hard-hit service sector and some consumers’ ability to draw down atypically large savings that built up during the pandemic.”
As reported by The News Service of Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis stated, “We kept business open. We got kids in school. We did all those things. And the result was our economy really started to rebound” regarding his efforts during the pandemic to return to normalcy, which is now positively affecting Florida’s economy.
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Casey Owens is a contributing writer at The Florida Capital Star. Follow him on Twitter at @cowensreports. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Florida Senate Capitol” by Michael Rivera CC 3.0.
