Here’re some details from the Tucson Weekly, which is crunching state budget numbers:

• The total tax take for the month was $681 million, which was more than $90 million below forecast.
• In the first six months of the fiscal year, tax collections have shrunk 16.7 percent compared to the previous year.
• Sales taxes were off by 10 percent in December. Merchants can be happy that the retail sector was only off by 3 percent, but construction workers lost out as contracting taxes dropped by more than 36 percent. Sales tax collections, by the way, have been shrinking for 23 months.

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