Commercial Critical of Barletta Contains Falsehoods

Commercial: Lou Barletta: Can’t Trust Him To Be for Us

Length: 30 seconds

Script: Narrator: While Lou Barletta was mayor, spending increased nearly 50 percent. In one year, the debt doubled. Barletta raided the pension plan, and left it underfunded by $23 million. And just like George Bush, Barletta supported privatizing Social Security, putting your money in the stock market. You could have lost 40 percent of your retirement investments in one year. Lou Barletta, can’t trust him to be for us. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Evaluation: This commercial contains a falsehood that has been debunked repeatedly, oversimplifications that lack context and some truth.

Barletta never supported privatizing Social Security by allowing its money to go into the stock market.

The 40 percent figure comes from the drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average between Oct. 9, 2007, and Oct. 9, 2008, not any specific stock or stocks, though, undoubtedly, many stocks lost value that year.

The ad is correct that Hazleton’s budget increased almost 50 percent between 2000, Barletta’s first year in office, and this year. The increase was 47.9 percent. But that was not that far off from other local cities. In the same period, Wilkes-Barre’s budget increased more than 45 percent and Scranton’s almost 37 percent.

In backup documentation provided by the DCCC, the committee cites newspaper stories that show the city’s debt was $800,000 as of August 2009 and expected to go to $2 million by the end of that year. The $2 million deficit never happened, and the basis for the comparison is wrong. The correct comparison would have been whatever the city’s deficit – not debt – was at the end of 2008 and what it was at the end of 2009. The figures were not immediately available Wednesday, but clearly Hazleton had a large deficit at the end of 2009 because Barletta had to sharply raise property and income taxes this year.

The claim that Barletta raided the pension plan is supported by evidence. The city, believing a gray area in the law allowed it to do so, wrongly used $2.5 million in money that should have gone into its pension plans to pay retirees’ health-care benefits and buy back unused vacation and sick leave from employees who signed up for an early retirement incentive, according to a state audit. It continued to do that, even after the state auditor general warned against it. A change in state law adopted last year allowed the city to avoid having to pay back that money to the pension funds.

The city’s pension plan is underfunded by $23.9 million, and that $2.5 million would have reduced that amount, but the pension plan was underfunded by millions of dollars long before Barletta was mayor. More than half the municipal pension plans across the state are in some form of distress. Hazleton’s pension funding, considered moderately distressed by a state pension panel, is a lot worse than Wilkes-Barre’s, which is minimally distressed, but better than Scranton’s, which is severely distressed

Click here to read the full story.