Senate President Stanley Rosenberg today disparaged Gov. Charlie Baker’s $38 billion budget plan, saying it fails to “invest in the future.”
During an appearance this morning on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program, Rosenberg applauded the Swampscott Republican for putting together a budget in just eight weeks but said the plan “doesn’t show where we could be doing better in order to strengthen the economy.”
In an attempt to plug a projected $1.8 billion budget gap created by growing costs, lagging revenues and what Baker called the “spending problem” he inherited, the governor’s proposal makes cuts across state government, including axing $761 million from MassHealth, the mammoth state Medicaid program.
“It’s a draft,” Rosenberg said of Baker’s plan to cut spending throughout state government. “The way I look at his budget is it’s a really good attempt at a budget to close the structural deficit — what it does not do is invest in the future.”
Rosenberg said he and other state legislators are “digging very deeply” into the plan in the hopes of identifying ways to “help strengthen the economy and help working families.”
“We’ll take a look and see if we can find some ways of trying to address at least a few of the things that will help strengthen the economy and help working families. But we don’t know if we can do that,” Rosenberg told hosts Jaclyn Cashman and Hillary Chabot. “So we’re going to have to take a hard look at it.”
