Originally posted on WBUR.

Lawmakers will be making election-year choices on how to handle the lame-duck governor’s proposal. Some who testified during the hearing indicated Baker’s bill could serve as a starting point for the committee to assemble its own tax policy legislation.

Mike Festa of AARP Massachusetts floated incorporating a tax credit to support unpaid family caregivers, and Charlotte Bruce of Children’s HealthWatch at Boston Medical Center and the Healthy Families EITC Coalition suggested including expansions of the earned income tax credit.

Baker, after the hearing, said he took the committee’s questioning as a “really positive sign that we’ll be doing something for tax policy for the people of Massachusetts this session.”

“The tax rate and policy changes, there’s a lot in there, and I would expect that going through a process like this one, it will change,” he said. “And I think the most important thing for me is that, at the end of this, we’ve done some things to modernize our tax code, we’ve done some things to simplify our tax code, and we’ve given some tax breaks to people who need them and deserve them and continue to make ourselves more competitive, and that could be any combination of a bunch of those elements.”