* US Department of Commerce…

Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for March 2020, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $483.1 billion, a decrease of 8.7 percent (±0.4 percent) from the previous month, and 6.2 percent (±0.7 percent) below March 2019.

* The NY Times reports that this is by far the biggest decline in three decades of government record-keeping…

And that’s just March. April is likely gonna be worse.

* From Mark Robyn, senior officer for state fiscal health at The Pew Charitable Trusts…

The sharp drop in retail spending we saw this morning poses significant challenges for state budgets. General sales taxes raise nearly a third of all state tax revenues nationally, and are the largest tax revenue source in 15 of the 45 states that collect them. They are particularly crucial for six states where they accounted for more than half of all tax collections (as of fiscal 2018): Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Furthermore, this morning’s retail sales data illustrates how different this economic downturn is from past recessions. Historically, sales taxes have provided a relatively stable source of tax revenue for states, helping to smooth out the ups and downs from taxing more volatile economic activity such as capital gains, corporate income, or oil extraction. For the last two decades, they have been a more stable source of revenue than personal or corporate income, severance, and property taxes in all but four states where they are levied. Today’s drop in retail spending illustrates one more way the pandemic poses a new challenge for state leaders attempting to stabilize their budgets.

About 34 percent of the money collected by the Illinois Department of Revenue comes from sales taxes.