Surplus Silence UPDATE
The Memphis Commercial Appeal ran an Associated Press story reporting Tennessee's revenue surplus on August 13 - only the AP story refuses to call the surplus a surplus and, in fact, bent over backward to turn it into a shortfall.

Total collections for the year were $8.5 billion - or about $2.6 million above the budgeted estimates for the fiscal year, which in the world of estimating tax revenues is right on the dot.

Perhaps, but even that small a surplus is still a surplus - and still worth reporting as a surplus given the four years of stories about how the state's tax code was destined to forever produce revenue shortfalls. The AP continues:

"We're certainly better off than where we thought we would be last March when the governor's budget came out," Deputy Finance Commissioner Gerald Adams said. "We had assumed we'd under-collect by about $64 million, and we think it's closer to $25 million." Most of that $25 million was recouped through a change in the law that accelerated franchise tax payments. In the aggregate, the total came out almost exactly as predicted.

Adams is playing a semantic game, and the AP reporter fell for it, allowing Adams to imply the surplus was not really a surplus but a $25 million shortfall.

Don't believe it. The accelerated franchise tax payments were part of the state's overall revenue collection estimate, and the state collected $2.6 million more than that estimate. There was no under-collection. There was no shortfall. There was only a small but historically and politically significant surplus.