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Adam Reilly talks with GBH News State House correspondent Katie Lannan and Evan Horowitz of Tufts University's Center for State Policy Analysis about the challenges of fiscal policymaking at a moment of intense uncertainty.

The House’s billion-dollar tax package largely mirrored Healey’s plan, but Senate leaders have downplayed any “urgency.” cSPA Executive Director Evan Horowitz said “sustainable” hits somewhere in the range of $500 million.

On the estate tax: Evan Horowitz at Tufts’ Center for State Policy Analysis told MASSterList that the “badly designed tax” is due for some updating.

“This is not a calamitous collapse in tax revenue. It’s a one-month shortfall. It was a big one month shortfall, but we’re still on track for the year,” Evan Horowitz, executive director of cSPA, told Playbook.

"That's a pretty substantial shortfall, and it really does change the tax trajectory for the fiscal year," said Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University.

Evan Horowitz, executive director at the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, traced the downturn to over-optimistic assumptions about revenue growth.

“It’s the first month that all the weirdness of COVID was flushed out of the tax system,” Horowitz said. The revenue drop, he added, is a “reminder that the unusual times we’ve been living through were quite unusual.”

He said he’s surprised at just how much chatter he’s hearing about people wanting to leave. “A lot of it is gossip and it’s too early to have hard data,” he said. “But the gossip is super interesting and revealing in some way.”

Neutral analysts like Evan Horowitz of the Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis who called the cap-gains cut and her proposed estate tax reforms “just tax cuts that benefit wealthy people.”