As business owners, do you think something like this would truly motivate you to hire additional employees?

As potential employees, do you think this is the best the government could do on your behalf to promote additional hiring?

Tell me what you think.  Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Will it make any difference at all? Is it a long term solution or is it just one more meaningless tax incentive offering a short term solution with not enough real benefits on either side of wall?

Here is a short description of the story by The Slatest

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Momentum Grows for a Job-Creation Tax Credit    

It’s a tool that was last tried in 1977, but now there seems to be growing support for awarding a tax credit to businesses that create new jobs. The measure was actually included in the stimulus package, but it was jettisoned before it was approved due to concerns that companies could exploit the system. Now, more politicians seem to believe that while a little abuse might be inevitable, it could still be a good, and relatively cheap, way to create jobs at a time when the unemployment rate is inching closer to 10 percent. When the same system was tried in the late 1970s, there were questions about whether the jobs that were created were permanent, and many doubted that the companies would have created the new jobs eventually without the credit. Now advocates of the system say that they can learn from the mistakes of three decades ago to make sure a job-creation tax credit has a bigger bang this time around. But, of course, it seems inevitable that the credit would help companies that would be hiring whether there’s a tax break or not. Whatever ends up happening, lawmakers need to either pass the measure quickly or drop it completely because companies might delay hiring if they think the tax break is in the pipeline.

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Read a full article on the subject at NYTIMES.COM.  One important issue from the report is a description of the actual benefits that will be seen by businesses in one of the proposals currently being reviewed by the legislature:

Under the proposal from Mr. Bartik and Mr. Bishop, the credit in the first year would equal 15.3 percent of the cost of adding an employee. In the second year, it would fall to about 10.2 percent.

For example, hiring a worker might cost a small business $50,000 annually. But with the tax credit, the cost would fall to $42,350 in the first year, and then be $44,900 the next year. After that, the cost would return to $50,000.

The credit would apply only to the portion of an employee’s salary under $106,800. Lowering the cap further, however, could provide an even greater benefit to low-wage, unskilled workers.

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Last Man Standing

With the closure of Circuit City earlier this year — and Comp USA before that — Best Buy is the only remaining national electronics chain. On its face, that would seem like a good thing for the company. But analysts argue that Best Buy has inherited a lump of coal.

Even in good times, electronics retailing can be a brutally tough business, littered with failures that were unable to survive thin profit margins, ever-falling prices, feast-and-famine product cycles and, more recently, major price pressure from Internet retailers.

Best Buy is “the last man standing, and it’s a good company,” said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. But “consumer electronics is one of the worst businesses in the world to be in.”  Brian J. Dunn, Best Buy’s new chief executive, disputed that characterization.

At the same time, Mr. Dunn, who started as a store salesman at Best Buy in 1985, plans to keep renovating. He acknowledges that being the last remaining chain won’t ensure success.

Mr. Dunn said that Best Buy must account for changing tastes, like the shift away from CDs and DVDs, which have for years been a crucial generator of foot traffic in Best Buy stores. To cope, Mr. Dunn said, Best Buy was in the process of moving those products out of the center of its stores and focusing eyes and attention on fast-growing product areas, like mobile phones and low-cost laptops.

And Mr. Dunn said he wanted to create an atmosphere where consumers were attracted not just to products but also to services that help them master fast-changing technology and configure and connect devices.

“The center of the store will become an expression of the way people connect — connect with movies, music, pictures, to each other — all the things that matter,” he said.

Read the entire story @ NYTimes.com/business

Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an accountand has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcastuse Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

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To Read the Entire Article visit NYTimes.com/business