Happy days – as in the Roaring Aughts of a decade or so ago, pre-Great Recession – may not be here again quite yet, but happier days than lately certainly seem to be.
The Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area created jobs at the fastest rate of any major metropolitan area in the country in August, according to a report from the online employment aggregator Bright.com.
With 168.44 job openings per 10,000 residents, the area ranked comfortably ahead of the runner-up, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington in Texas.
In 2009-12, the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area registered the second-largest increase in average annual wages among large metro areas, The Atlantic says online, drawing from federal data.
The $4,320 bump, to an annual average of $57,560, ranked behind only the increase in the Washington, D.C., area. And when smaller cities are included, Bellingham comes in at No. 7 with a $4,440 gain to $44,310, just ahead of Seattle on the broader list.
That kind of growth should have a positive impact on the state budget – and that appears to be the case.
The state Economic and Revenue Forecast Council said this month that collections by the state for Aug. 11-Sept. 10 were $65 million higher than projected in the June quarterly forecast, continuing a trend of the last few months. The next quarterly forecast is scheduled for Sept. 18.
That kind of news will be most welcome to the Legislature’s budget writers.
Thanks to improvement in the economy – state revenue is now, finally, returning to its pre-recession level – in June they passed a balanced budget for the two-year 2013-15 fiscal cycle that included close to $1 billion in new money for K-12 education.
That money was just the first step toward addressing the state Supreme Court’s 2012 McCleary decision, which held that more school spending was needed to comply with the state constitution.
But billions more will be required by 2018 to satisfy the court.