Corbett uses sarcasm to hit Wolf on taxes

The challenge of political ad-making in this fractured media age is to get the viewer to pay attention.

Gov. Tom Corbett (R) is trying a little satire in his new 30-second spot called "Say What." It shows (presumably) middle-class Pennsylvanians protesting that they aren't paying enough in taxes and expressing the hope that Democrat Tom Wolf will become governor so he can soak them.

"It says here Tom Wolf's going to raise the tax on middle-class families," a man says, glancing up from his newspaper at the family breakfast table. "It's about time somebody does." His wife adds, "We just have way too much money."

A man behind the counter in an auto parts store says he's already working two jobs and sees no barrier to getting a third – so bring it on.

"Tom Wolf understands that Harrisburg knows how to spend my money better than I do," says a guy in a Carhartt jacket eating lunch on the tailgate of his pickup truck.

You get the idea.

The opening comes from Wolf's desire to make the state's flat personal income tax of 3.07 percent more progressive, so that the wealthier pay more and, he says, the middle class pays less.  This likely would involve enacting personal exemptions for certain levels of household income.

The devil is in the details, and Wolf has not spelled out the exemptions or tax rate he would propose. Corbett's campaign has been happy to fill in the details, using a hypothetical example from a Wolf interview to suggest that higher taxes would hit households making as little as $70,000, which many people would consider middle class.