Taxes – Page 5 – Barter is Evil

28 February 2018

Grand Forks Sales Tax Collections February 2018

Grand Forks released retail sales tax collections which are for the month of December 2017. There are various different ways to look at the number. It is a .31% increase over December of 2016. An increase is an increase I suppose, though it should be cause for concern if the general optimism permeating the economy surrounding the tax cut happened to miss Grand Forks. The January and February releases for this year, which represent sales tax collected in November and December of 2017, are around 6.5% less than this time last year. It is also the case that 17 of the last 38 months have been lower than year ago values for sales tax collections.

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31 January 2018

Seasonality in GF sales tax data

Sales tax data is a continuing theme for me these days and so I thought we could look at any seasonal patterns in the data. I am going to hold off on the formal statistical tests for right now and we will go with the graphical approach. If there is seasonality in the data the graph should show common movements in the lines for different years. For example, if June is always a slow month for retail sales the collections should drop for most June observations compared to the May observations. I generate this for 2001 to 2017.

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27 January 2018

Recent sales tax in Grand Forks

A closer look at recent sales tax data seems a logical follow-up to the long run view from last time. There are two things to note from this graph: 1) the negative trend is still clearly evident, and 2) the reduction in volatility from the twelve month rolling is clear.

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25 January 2018

Grand Forks Sales Tax Collections: A longer view

The January sales tax collections data came out recently and I want to take a longer view of the data here. This typically means messier graphs because the time scale gets compressed. I will put up a post with a shorter timeline tomorrow. Why the longer timeline? I think it is necessary if we are going to try and interpret or understand the numbers we are currently seeing.

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29 December 2017

Taxes and timing

One of the most interesting stories of the aftermath of the tax legislation is the race to pay property taxes this year in many states so they still qualify for deductions. Clearly this is a big issue for those living in high tax states. The images are amazing when you think about it. When was the last time you saw a line of people to pay their taxes well before the due date?

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