tom wolf, tom corbett

Pennsylvania Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf, left, is challenging incumbent Gov. Tom Corbett in the Nov. 4 general election.

(AP Photos/file)

Some of the most prominent claims being made in the race for Pennsylvania governor between Republican incumbent Tom Corbett and Democrat Tom Wolf, and a look at the facts behind them.

CLAIM: Corbett says Wolf is planning to raise middle-class income taxes.

ANALYSIS: Wolf has proposed raising the state's 3.07 percent income tax, then excluding a certain portion of income as part of a plan to increase what higher earners pay and cut what some in the middle class pay. He says billions of dollars of new revenue could be generated to help finance his plan to raise the state's share of public school spending to 50 percent from its current level, below 35 percent, while reducing school property taxes by a dollar-for-dollar amount.

The proposal would be a centerpiece of his first budget plan. It would need legislative approval.

Wolf has not been explicit about whose taxes would go up and whose would go down. He has identified middle-class taxpayers for purposes of his plan as those with taxable incomes of roughly $70,000 to $90,000, double that for a married couple. He said those who earn more would see tax increases, while lower-income households would not have to pay anything.

CLAIM: Corbett says Wolf's plan would raise income taxes by 188 percent.

ANALYSIS: Corbett's campaign cites an analysis by the Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation, a libertarian policy organization that advocates for lower taxes. The analysis assumes Wolf would need to produce an additional $4.6 billion for education from the income tax to fulfill his campaign promises. That includes money to reverse the 2011 school funding reductions that Corbett approved and to ensure the state government shoulders half the cost public school funding burden, up from the current one-third.

But that leaves out some important points.

For one thing, Wolf has said he would not use the income tax alone to raise that new money for school funding. He also proposes imposing a 5 percent severance tax on Pennsylvania's thriving natural gas industry and closing business tax loopholes. Also, the foundation's analysis does not mention the reciprocal reduction in local school property taxes that Wolf says would comprise the essential other half of the massive shift in education funding.

CLAIM: Wolf says Corbett cut education funding by $1 billion.

ANALYSIS: Corbett's first budget in 2011 reduced the state's overall spending authorization by almost $1.2 billion. An Associated Press analysis found that operations and instruction in local school districts saw a reduction of $860 million, or more than 10 percent. An additional $240 million was cut from higher education.

Corbett says he did not cut aid to public schools. Rather, he says, the money schools lost resulted from the expiration of $2.6 billion in use-it-or-lose-it federal recession aid, about $1 billion of which went to public schools during the last year of Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell's administration.

Corbett did not ask lawmakers to raise taxes or divert money from other programs to offset the loss to public schools. Meanwhile, his first budget reduced business taxes by an estimated $400 million and tucked $660 million into reserves.

The current budget allocates about $600 million less on operations and instruction in public schools than the budget Corbett inherited from Rendell. It spends about $160 million less on higher education.

Corbett has argued that federal recession aid should not be counted as aid to schools and that legally required payments for public school employee pension costs — which have grown by $870 million since he took office — should be counted. Using those figures, funding for public schools is higher.

CLAIM: Wolf says Corbett is responsible for Pennsylvania's job growth being among the slowest in the nation.

ANALYSIS: Pennsylvania has been in the top half of states in job growth in the past 20 years only when the rest of the country is doing poorly. According to nonseasonally adjusted federal job statistics assembled by the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Corbett's track record is slightly worse than Pennsylvania's historically slow economic growth over the last 20 years.

Only once since the 1990s has Pennsylvania's annual average job growth ranked in the top 10 — in 2010, when Pennsylvania was ninth. That was at a time when many of the harder-hit, higher-growth states were recovering from the Great Recession.

Last year, Pennsylvania's annual average ranked 48th. Overall, Pennsylvania ranks 41st in job growth in the last 20 years. It ranks 46th in the nearly four years since Corbett became governor, and it ranked 28th in the eight years under Rendell, though Rendell's best three annual averages were during the recession. Otherwise, his best annual average never scored higher than 35th.