State budget writers watch his quarterly revenue forecasts closely to see how much money they’ll have to pay for K-12 schools, colleges, health care, and the myriad of other programs and services funded by the state operating budget. He also has a keen understanding of trends in the state and national economies, and how those might impact Washington.
Host Austin Jenkins sits down for an in-depth economics talk with David Reich, who a year ago took over as the state’s chief economic forecaster, and serves as head of the Washington State Economic and Revenue Forecast Council.
On the state of the state economy, and what budget writers should expect to work with now and in the near-term future: “Both the national and the state economy are transitioning to a slower, kind of a slower growth framework … our forecast for growth annually … 3 to 4 percent a year, which is historically a little bit on the slow side, and certainly slower than we’ve seen in the decade prior to COVID, so sort of 2010 to 2019, when we were averaging maybe 7-1/2 percent a year.”
On what a Trump administration and tariffs may mean for the economy: “Well at this point, you know, we really don’t know a lot … we are a pretty trade dependent state, you know, about 20 percent of our exports are agricultural products, they’re probably the ones that would be impacted pretty significantly as they were back in 2018 … there’s just so much uncertainty not only on what domestic policy will be, but also how other countries will retaliate, or will they retaliate?”
Other topics touched on in the interview: the potential economic benefits and risks of artificial intelligence, the sale of EV cars and the downward trend in gas tax revenues, the national debt, funding social security – and much more. Take a deep dive into economics, this week on Inside Olympia.