From NJ Spotlight, September 20, 2012:

One day after Standard & Poor’s lowered New Jersey’s fiscal outlook from stable to negative, the Christie administration confirmed the bad news. The latest revenue figures show that state tax revenues are running $99.873 million — or 4.9 percent — below the governor’s projections for the first two months of the fiscal year.

A particularly ominous sign in the revenue report is that sales tax collections in August were $42.8 million lower than the Christie administration’s projections for the month, continuing a worrisome trend of subpar sales tax collections in recent months.

“Sales tax collections were always among the steadiest revenues,” NJPP’s David Rousseau tells NJ Spotlight. “You could count on 2 percent growth just about every year and 5 percent in good times. But sales tax revenues have been essentially flat for months.”