WASHINGTON – Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Scranton and Republican Rep. Lou Barletta of Hazleton have very different ideas about how to boost job creation and the role of the federal government in encouraging the still shaky economic recovery.

From the debt ceiling battle earlier this summer between Senate Democrats and House Republicans to diametrically opposed ideas about the right mix of federal spending cuts and tax revenues for the $1.2 trillion in savings a special debt-reduction congressional committee is assigned to reach later this year, Casey and Barletta are emblematic of the partisan fiscal impasse that has deadlocked the Capitol this year.

But one thing they agree on is that establishing a 21st century Works Progress Administration is not the answer to lowering the country’s unemployment rate.

Of course, even while agreeing that a modern-day WPA is not the right prescription for healing the country’s 9 percent-plus unemployment rate, Casey and Barletta argue the point from drastically divergent perspectives.

Barletta says that he simply, “can’t trust the federal government to create a new WPA.”

A federally run jobs program putting Americans to work on public projects would mean the Obama administration “will squander more taxpayer money like they did with the stimulus bill,” Barletta said via email. “They spent $800 billion and America lost 2 million jobs. They promised us that if they spent $800 billion in taxpayer money, the unemployment rate wouldn’t go over 8 percent. Now, the unemployment rate has been over 9 percent for 25 of the last 27 months.”

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