Cork your bubbly; it's just $75 million

North Carolina has a little extra cash on hand these days, but it's hardly mad money.

The state has received about $75 million more than expected through September, according to state budget experts. The increase is less than 1 percent of the state's total $20 billion budget. And while it never hurts to have a little extra cash on hand, especially when other states are reeling from shortfalls, the increase is nothing to celebrate.

"It's too early to get excited one way or the other. If we had been down, I'd be saying the same thing," said Barry Boardman, an economist in the General Assembly's Fiscal Research Division. "The first quarter, really the first half, tells you very little about where you're going to end up at the end of the year."

Other states are collecting less than projected. Virginia, for one, is facing a $641 million shortfall. The national economy is slowing down because of a slump in housing, softening in the credit markets, rising energy costs and other factors.

In North Carolina, the state's revenue projections took into account the national trends, Boardman said.

The current increase likely means that the economy is so far holding and that the conservative revenue projections were a sound decision, said Dan Gerlach, a senior fiscal adviser to Gov. Mike Easley.

"What it does tell you is that unlike other places, the sales tax revenues are not falling off. There's still strong income tax growth on the personal side," Gerlach said. "It tells you that North Carolina's economy is holding."

But experts won't have a real sense of the state's fiscal health until next year when more volatile taxes, such as corporate income tax filings start coming in, Gerlach said.