A new survey shows Democrat Tom Wolf leading Gov. Tom Corbett but by a clear but somewhat smaller margin than previous post-primary polls.

The poll, conducted for CBS and the New York Times by the internet polling firm, YouGov, shows Mr. Wolf leading the incumbent, 52 percent to 39 percent, including respondents who said they were leaning toward one candidate or the other. That’s a reasonably comfortable advantage for the Democrat, but well short of the margins in the 20-point range he recorded in some earlier polls.  Without the leaners, Mr. Wolf’s lead fell to single digits, 42 percent to 33 percent.

The details of tax policy, more than almost anything else in politics, make people’s eyes glaze over.

It’s a shame that the nitty-gritty of taxes is so often ignored, because terms like “job killing tax hikes” remain ubiquitous – and virtually meaningless.

So here’s an attempt to have an honest look at the income tax in Pennsylvania.

So, did Governor Corbett cut state spending on education? Or did he increase it? Well, it depends.

Education is the most important issue for voters in Pennsylvania’s upcoming gubernatorial election, according to polls. Democrats have spent years attacking Gov. Tom Corbett for cutting education spending, and it seems that the message has resonated with voters. Gov. Corbett has, they claim, cut education spending by a billion dollars.

Gov. Corbett, on the other hand, says the exact opposite. According to his campaign website: “Education funding for Pennsylvania’s kids has increased by more than $1 billion since Gov. Corbett took office.”

Wait, what?

Someone must be lying, right? Well, actually, no not really. It just depends how you look at it. So here’s the story, and it’s up to the voters of Pennsylvania to decide which version they prefer.

When the Great Recession hit in 2008, everyone’s finances were devastated, and that included states. Falling incomes and failing businesses means declining tax returns – that, in turn, leads to tighter budgets.

In the face of such a disaster, the newly inaugurated Obama Administration took an FDR/New Deal-style approach with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – popularly known as the stimulus, or ARRA. The idea was that an infusion of federal dollars, to the tune of around $800 billion, would help make up for the overall decline in demand in the economy. A good chunk of the money went to states to help them fill their budget shortfalls caused by the recession.

Facing falling revenues, Governor Ed Rendell reduced the state contribution to public education funding but more than made up for it with federal stimulus dollars. The Corbett campaign has treated this as some kind of pseudo-scandal, with an administration briefing document saying stimulus money “should never have been used in school operating budgets.”

But the stimulus was intended to do exactly what Gov. Rendell used it for – to help cushion the recession’s blow to the state. This was not unique to Pennsylvania.

A 2012 report from the Center on Education Policy states: “ARRA funding helped to blunt the effects of the budget cuts in k-12 education faced by most school districts and many states.”

Because of Gov. Rendell’s use of the stimulus money, education funding in Pennsylvania increased in the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 budgets.

Without remaining stimulus funds, that state would have had to significantly increase its contribution to education in 2011-2012. It did not, and education funding fell in the 2011-2012 budget, and then increased from that level in the 2012-2013, 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 budgets, but only just reached the stimulus-aided level of 2009-2010, which itself was lower than the stimulus-aided level in 2010-2011.

Here you have it, in chart form:

*$4.87 billion from the state, with additional $654 million in federal stimulus.

**$4.73 billion from the state, with additional $1.04 billion in federal stimulus.

So, where do both sides get their numbers?

The Democrats are using the 2010-2011 stimulus-aided $5.77 billion as the base-line. With that as the starting point, you get a $420 million cut in ’11-’12, a $370 million cut in ’12-’13, a $250 million cut in ’13-’14 and a $240 million cut in ’14-15. That adds up to $1.28 billion in funding over four years that would have been there had the number been kept at $5.77 billion. It was not, and the Democrats can thus claim, credibly, that education has been cut by over a billion dollars.

Now, to Gov. Corbett’s claim that he has increased education funding by a billion dollars. For his base-line he uses the state’s $4.73 billion contribution in 2010-2011, and ignores all of the federal stimulus dollars that went to education. With $4.73 billion as the base-line, state aid to education went up by $620 million in ’11-’12, then another $50 million in ’12-’13, $120 million in ’13-’14 and $10 million in ’14-’15.

The question then, for voters, is basically how they want to count.

Also, here are some graphs, specifically tailored to your political viewpoint. And yes, I used a website called “Kids’ Zone” to make these, because excel is too complicated.

For you non-partisans:

For Democrats:

For Republicans:

                                                    By James M. Perry

If Hillary Rodham Clinton stumbles badly in her unannounced campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, we now have a lady in waiting. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.  

The 65-year-old Warren is the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, but spent most of her career as a college professor, most recently at the Harvard Law School 

What's her secret? First of all, she's a fresh face at a time when most Americans probably believe we need a new start. Second of all, she's outspoken. She's part Populist, part liberal, and entirely committed. By all accounts, she was a wildly popular teacher, and she takes those classrooms skills to the hustings. 

She appeared the other day in Shepherdstown, W. Va., to campaign for Senate candidate Natalie Tennant, a long shot to succeed retiring Democrat Jay Rockefeller. She was greeted like a rock star, one observer said. The crowd "openly embraced" her standard attacks on the super-wealthy and Wall Street, "Citibank and Goldman Sachs and all those other guys on Wall Street," she said, "they've got plenty of folks in the U.S. Senate willing to work on their side. We need some people willing to work on this side of America's families. Natalie's that fighter."

Probably too simplistic for one of her Harvard classrooms, but effective, nonetheless. 

The most recent Gallup poll reports that 91 per cent of American voters know who Mrs. Clinton is (who in the world are those other nine per cent?) and 55 per cent of those who know who she is have a favorable opinion of her. Only 38 per cent of the voters know who Senator Warren is, and 21 per cent of them have a favorable opinion of her.

So, of course, it makes no sense to write Mrs. Clinton off. She is still the favorite. But, in the last few months, there have been disturbing stories. Her interview with ABC News's Diane Sawyer was something of a disaster. 

Diane Sawyer: It has been reported you've made $5 million making speeches, the president's made more than $100 million. 

Hillary Clinton: Well, if you -- you have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea's education, you know, it was not easy.  

Left unsaid was the fact they knew they would soon be raking in the cash with book deals and lecture fees. 

Surely many Americans were startled to learn that Mrs. Clinton was paid $275,000 to give a speech Oct. 23, 2013 at the University of Buffalo, a state school with a piddling endowment. She explained later that the money ended up with the family's charitable foundation.

Several observers have expressed concern that Mrs. Clinton's book, "Hard Choices,'' for which Simon & Schuster reportedly paid her $14 million, has sold only 177,000 copies (a number most of us scribblers would die for). Her husband's last book sold more than two million copies. But there's a difference, I think, between an ex-president's memoirs, and an ex-secretary of state's, even if her name is Clinton. 

Senator Warren is no elitist. She grew up in tough times in Oklahoma City (her family sold the car at one time to pay the bills). She didn't go to Harvard or Yale law schools. She went to Rutgers in Newark, N.J. But she's come a long way since then. She made about $350,000 a year at Harvard and made even more with her books and lectures. She and her husband, Bruce Mann, are worth as much as $14 million. 

Mrs. Clinton needs to pull her rambling unofficial campaign together to avoid more talk about Senator Warren. It's time to stop this cat-and-mouse routine. Come on, Hillary, step right up and tell us you are running for president in 2016.

James M. Perry, a prominent veteran political reporter, is contributing regular observations for post-gazette.com.  Mr. Perry was the chief political correspondent of the The Wall Street Journal until his retirement.  Prior to that, he covered national politics for the Dow Jones weekly, The National Observer.