Historical Estimates of Total Taxable Resources for U.S. States, 1981-2000

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 55-72

  Compson, Michael L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0344630206     PISSN: 00485950     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (11)

1. U.S. General Accounting Office, Changing Medicaid Formula Can Improve Distribution of Funds to States (Washington, DC: GAO, 1983), GAO/GGD-83-27 or U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Measuring Fiscal Capacity: Alternative Methods and Their Uses (Washington, DC: ACIR, September 1986), M-150, for critiques of SPI as a measure of fiscal capacity.
2. U.S. General Accounting Office, Changing Medicaid Formula Can Improve Distribution of Funds to States (Washington, DC: GAO, 1983), GAO/GGD-83-27 or U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Measuring Fiscal Capacity: Alternative Methods and Their Uses (Washington, DC: ACIR, September 1986), M-150, for critiques of SPI as a measure of fiscal capacity.
3. See U.S. General Accounting Office, Medicaid Formula: Fairness Could Be Improved (Washington, DC: GAO, 1991), GAO/T-HRD-91-5 in which, for the first time, GAO suggested replacing SPI with TTR.
4. John Carnevale, "Experimental Estimates of Total Taxable Resources, 1981-84," Federal-State-Local Fiscal Relations: Technical Papers, Volume 2, comp., U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of State and Local Finance (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1986).
5. See Michael Compson and John Navratil, "An Improved Method for Estimating Total Taxable Resources of the States," U.S. Department of Treasury, Office of Economic Policy, Research Paper No. 9702 for a complete discussion of the shortcomings of the previous methodology and the development of the current methodology.
6. The underlying data series are updated annually, subject to rebenchmarking, typically done every five years, and subject to definitional and statistical improvements whenever annual revisions or rebenchmarking take place. See the October and December 1999 issues of the Survey of Current Business. for a description of the 11th comprehensive revision to the NIPA data. The revisions include several major definitional, classification, and statistical improvements that were made to improve the measurement of the evolving U.S. economy.
7. See U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of State and Local Finance, comp., Federal-Stale-Local Fiscal Relations: Report to the President and Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1985) and Federal-State-Local Fiscal Relations: Technical Papers, Volume 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1986).
8. See U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of State and Local Finance, comp., Federal-Stale-Local Fiscal Relations: Report to the President and Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1985) and Federal-State-Local Fiscal Relations: Technical Papers, Volume 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1986).
9. Max Sawicky, "The Total Taxable Resources Definition of State Revenue-Raising Ability," Federal-State-Local Fiscal Relations: Technical Papers, Volume 2, comp., Office of State and Local Finance, Department of the Treasury (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1986).
10. When TTR was revised in 1998, the estimates for these transfers also included federal civilian employee retirement benefits, military retirement payments, state and local government employee retirement payments, and other government retirement payments. Since the definitional changes to the NIPA's data in 1999, these payments are no longer included in the transfer payments or in SPI because they are not considered part of current production. Treasury is investigating the impact of these definitional changes on the estimates of TTR.
11. The estimates of TTR contained in this research note are generated using a single, consistent methodology for estimating TTR, the most recent estimates of state personal income and gross state product issued the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and estimates from the Statistics of Income Bulletin (Internal Revenue Service). They are not intended to update the "official" Treasury estimates of TTR, nor should they be construed to be, in any manner, official Treasury estimates of TTR. Unequivocally, the official estimates for TTR continue to be those that have been released by Treasury since 1992 for use in the SAMHSA block-grant formulas. The estimates presented in this article are for research purposes only.