State Tax Revenues Surge To Highest Levels Ever

Because conservatives are, by nature, alarmists enthralled by prevailing fears of the moment, 
they tend to ignore the "sine wave" of life.

The economy is not a train wreck.

Obamacare is not a train wreck.

The Republican Party is a train wreck...
which Republicans project onto the world around them.

***

Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris. Concerning taxes. 25 December, 1783

"The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law. All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html 

"State governments collected more than $846 billion in tax revenue in the last fiscal year, the highest amount ever reported, as a rebounding economy boosted coffers hit hard by the recession. The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that states collected $309 billion in individual income taxes last year, a 10 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. Income taxes make up more than a third of total state tax revenues. Corporate income tax collections rose to $45 billion, up almost 8 percent from the year before....State tax collections have rebounded after a recession that dried up individual and corporate income tax revenues. In Fiscal Year 2008, just as the recession began, states collected $779 billion in total tax revenue. That number fell off a cliff in the following two years, to $713 billion in Fiscal Year 2009 and $705 billion in Fiscal Year 2010. Those shortfalls forced harsh cuts in state budgets." Reid Wilson in The Washington Post.