A Month Late and a Few Million Dollars Short
News travels slowly to Kingsport, Tennessee, apparently. The Tuesday edition of the Kingsport Times-News carried this story with the following headline: November sales tax revenue largely flat across state .

Okay.

But the Sundquist administration released the November revenue data in mid-December. It was in all the papers on December 12th, including this story in The Tennessean. I had it here on December 11th. (Yes, I beat the dailies by a day.)

And the December data was released on January 10 by the Sundquist administration. I reported it here less than an hour after the data was released. The daily paper in Nashville reported it the next day and the Knoxville and Memphis dailies worked the data into stories over the weekend. So I beat them to the punch by a day or more.

We all beat the Times-News by more than a month on reporting the December tax revenue data, and there's no telling when they'll get around to reporting the January numbers. That's a shame, because until they do, their readers in Kingsport are living under the false notion that sluggish tax revenues are creating a deficit in Nashville. But the truth is the December revenue totals were higher than expected and erased the emerging shortfall. Today, new Gov. Phil Bredesen says the state does indeed face a shortfall this year, but it is caused by TennCare cost overruns, not by sluggish revenues.

You learned this just today from The Tennessean and from me. I'm guessing the fine people of Kingsport will find out in mid-February.