From the Nashville City Paper:

State’s revenue shortfall deepens in December
Business, cigarette and sales taxes to blame for $182 million shortfall
BY JOHN RODGERS jrodgers@nashvillecitypaper.com 

State tax revenues took another hit Thursday, coming in $55.7 million less than expected for December and deepening the state’s financial hole to $182 million for this fiscal year.

Hmm. How could this be? The economists in Nashville thought that if you raised taxes on cigarettes, you’d make more revenue. I guess it didn’t work out that way, did it?

The GOP issued a presser:

NASHVILLE – The Tennessee Republican Party issues the following statement regarding the news today from the Tennessee Department of Finance & Administration that the state’s revenue shortfall has grown to $182.1 million five months into the current fiscal year.

“The growing revenue shortfall underlines the folly of Gov. Bredesen’s decision last year to request a budget that spent $723 million more than the state constitution’s spending growth limitation allows.
 
“The limit, called the ‘Copeland Cap,’ was designed to keep government from growing faster than average incomes of the people of Tennessee who pay the bills, but the Bredesen administration recklessly exploited a loophole to grow the budget faster than the people of this state can afford.
 
“If the administration had proposed and signed a budget that lived within the cap, the state would not have a revenue shortfall – rather, it would have more than $100 million in surplus revenue at this point in the fiscal year.
 
“Since it was enacted by voters in 1978, the history of the Copeland Cap has been that when it is exceeded by large amounts, as the Bredesen administration has done, large tax increases are required to sustain the higher rate of spending.”