WV income and outgo

It's nice for West Virginians to believe that our state economy lags behind other states because our tax system goes so easy on the consumer and hits business really hard. But that might not be true. Or, if true, not as true as some people think.

Here's how I know that.

Last week, West Virginia state Auditor Glen B. Gainer III placed a document on the Internet. It listed every state employee and the amount that person received in wages or salary in 2006. Some folks probably don't like the idea of their pay being put out there for the world to see.

On Gainer's Web site, I found another interesting document. It's called the 2006 State Dollar Report. It has a lot of information about the state's revenues and expenditures last year.

Here are the top sources of money for the state general revenue fund in fiscal year 2006:

Personal income tax: $1,297,720,394
Consumer sales tax: $1,012,450,612
Corporate income tax: $347,569,611
Severance tax: $314,726,682

I didn't think the personal income tax and consumer sales tax would be that much higher than the corporate income tax and the severance tax, but there it is. And I didn't think the severance tax would bring in almost as much money as the corporate income tax.

Consumers helped out the state budget in other ways. West Virginians paid more than $107 million in cigarette taxes.

If you compare 2006 to four years earlier, you see the corporate taxes growing at a faster rate than the personal and consumer taxes:

Consumer sales tax, 14.3% increase.
Personal income tax, 25.4% increase.
Corporate income tax, 298.1% increase.
Severance tax, 89% increase.

Over in the highway tax fund, consumers and businesses paid nearly $321 million in gasoline and motor carrier taxes.

Now, on to the expense side.

West Virginia spent about $1.1 billion on its colleges and universities in FY 06, not counting about $32.6 million to the WVU medical school. It spent about $948.5 million on highway construction and maintenance.

And as you might know the largest vendors paid by the state are highway construction companies. West Virginia Paving of Dunbar received $76.4 million, while Walsh Construction of Chicago got slightly less than $59.6 million.

The largest local vendor was Turman Construction Co. of Barboursville, which was paid $8.47 million. It was 40th on the vendor list. At Number 41 was Worldwide Equipment Inc. of Huntington, at about $8.3 million.

You can see the entire PDF document here. Warning: It's 3.86 megabytes.