New data shows that most of the predictions about how much cash would flow into state coffers for the month of February were wrong.

Controller John Chiang released the latest figures this afternoon, and the news is this: Governor Schwarzenegger’s projections for General Fund revenues missed the mark by $82 million, or 1.5 percent.

That may not seem too bad, considering that General Fund revenues totaled almost $96 billion in 2006-07. But it’s another warning sign about the current fragile state of the California economy.

In fact, an examination of the data shows that the shortfall was masked by what looks like a one-time spike in personal income tax revenues.

Chiang’s staff says that personal income tax receipts were $263 million better than expected, or 19.2 percent over projections… and that the money came from taxes withheld from paychecks.

Might more payroll taxes mean larger payrolls for companies, i.e. more jobs and a recovering economy?

Doubtful, says the new report. After all, California lost jobs in January; and it seems unlikely that a big turnaround appeared all of a sudden in February. Rather, the controller’s experts surmize that the extra cash probably came from one-time things like employees selling their stock options and pocketing the cash.

In other words, don’t pop the champagne corks.

And reinforcing that dour mood: sales tax receipts were $191 million below forecast (a 5.1 percent miss) and corporate tax receipts came in $24 million (or 12.5 percent) below expected levels.

That means that without the better-than-expected personal income tax revenues, February’s shortfall in actual state government cash might have been as much as four times worse than it ended up.

Speaking of the governor’s morning event… I asked Schwarzenegger to clarify his position on the idea of cancelling tax breaks to help resolve part of this year’s mammoth budget shortfall.

You may remember that last week, the guv created quite the buzz when it sounded as though he suggested he was willing to consider Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill’s suggestion to scrap as much as $2.5 billion in tax credits. Though Schwarzenegger later danced away from endorsing her specific ideas, both Democrats and Republicans are watching him closely on this issue. That’s because GOP legislators in particular define the cancellation of a tax credit as raising taxes.

So does Schwarzenegger agree with his fellow Republicans on that definition?

“We should not get caught up on what something is called,” the governor told me. “That doesn’t bring anyone any health care. It doesn’t bring anyone any education. It doesn’t hire teachers, it doesn’t expand our education program. What we need to do is fix problems.”

You can hear the entire exchange here.

That’s a safe answer that’s sure to please… no one. And at an event earlier in the morning (covered by my colleague Tamara Keith), Democrats made no bones about what’s needed to resolve the current budget crisis.

“Raise taxes,” said Senate President pro Tem Don Perata. “Is that clear enough? Raise taxes.”

And Perata took it one step further… hinting that if it takes a summertime showdown to do the right thing, he’s ready to wait it out. “This is going to be the fight of a lifetime,” he said. “We are not going to be going anywhere this summer.”

Something tells me that while the governor may hope otherwise, we’re going to spend a lot of time in the next few months arguing over what is… and isn’t… a tax increase.

It was this same week back in March 2005 when Governor Schwarzenegger threw down the gauntlet with legislators and interest groups and launched the most dramatic, and ultimately disastrous, chapter of his political career. And so it was worth noting that on the very same week in 2008, he returned to both a neighborhood… and an issue… that tripped him up last time.

Three years ago, the governor marched out of a statehouse press conference, jumped into one of his personal military-style Humvees, and drove himself (press corps in pursuit) to an Applebee’s restaurant in the Sacramento suburb of Natomas. There, he tried to cajole diners into helping him reform state politics — in part, by stripping legislators of their power to draw political districts.

We all know how that turned out.

This morning, Schwarzenegger went back to Natomas — but this time he stopped at the shopping center on the other side of the road (three-tenths of a mile away) — to launch another intiative campaign to reform redistricting. Working the early lunch/late breakfast crowd at a Mimi’s Cafe, the governor promoted a new redistricting initiative, this one written by Common Cause and AARP.

Tagging along was the governor’s old bipartisan pal, former state controller Steve Westly. Westly and Schwarzenegger, who teamed up in 2004 to convince voters to approve the deficit measures Proposition 57 and Proposition 58, will serve as co-chairs for the new redistricting campaign. Their goal is to collect enough signatures to get the constitutional amendment on the November ballot.

Westly was clearly enjoying himself, some 21 months after losing the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to challenge Schwarzenegger. The Bay Area Democrat hugged Schwarzenegger as the guv stepped out of his black SUV, and the two were joined at the hip as they made their way from table to table in the restaurant. (My favorite moment: a young mother asked the governor whether he wanted to hold her little boy. Schwarzenegger seemed as though he never heard her. Westly, on the other hand, jumped at the chance and had the blond haired little tyke bouncing in his arms in no time.)

Schwarzenegger still evokes the Hollywood reaction from average folks. But unlike 2005, he seemed to find a little more skepticism on the menu at this restaurant. One patron in particular, who identified herself as a Democrat, wanted to know why she would ever vote for a measure that would give Republicans a chance to win more elections. Both Schwarzenegger and Westly tried to answer her by talking up the virtues of more competitive races. “You want competition,” said the governor. “You want the best person to win.”

Of course, a bevy of independent researchers have concluded that even a non-partisan drawing of political maps will result in, at best, a few more than a dozen truly competitive seats in the Legislature. Many parts of California have self-segregated themselves when it comes to party affiliation and in those places you can’t draw districts with relatively even numbers of voters who are D’s and R’s.

And neither the governor nor the former controller told diners about what is not in the new initiative: independently drawn districts for members of Congress. “That’s another step we can take later on,” the governor told reporters when asked about that omission from this proposal. In an interview before the governor arrived, I asked Westly whether leaving congressional maps in the hands of legislators wasn’t really a way to keep the two political parties — jockeying for power in Washington — from spending a lot of money to defeat the initiative.

“There is no doubt it will be easier to pass in the current form,” he said.

What will be interesting is what happens next. Will a true bipartisan campaign team develop? What will the political parties do? And what happens to the initiative’s fortunes if voter turnout for an historic presidential election is huge come November? Yes, Governor Schwarzenegger has lent his time and efforts to subsequent initiative campaigns since his 2005 debacle. But this is the issue that time and again he comes back to as the primal political wound in the body politic. And so as he worked the booths and tables of another Sacramento restaurant to again try and change redistricting… just across the street from where he did so in 2005… one had to wonder whether the outcome this time will be different.