This week brings you more on President Obama’s thinking when it comes to offering small business policy goodies in the hopes of getting said small businesses to start hiring again.

I don’t know how well that sort of incentive would work. Small employers would no doubt welcome some sort of payroll tax holiday or cut in same. But I also think that smart small business owners won’t hire if the dibs are not in tune and this sort of tax carrot won’t get them to create jobs unless they would have created those jobs anyway.

I’ve said this before: a lot of other things have to be going right before you’re ready to start hiring. Just offering a tax break of some kind isn’t enough, from a business point of view.

This being an election year, it will be interesting to see what the economy does, how slowly or quickly it starts chugging again and when and to what degree the Democrats start to panic.

It’ll also be interesting to see whether the Republicans will be able to campaign on health care reform repeal and be successful if everybody is still kind of preoccupied with the economy.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and for the record, I will be sending out a correction in next week’s newsletters. I mistakenly reported (in the newsletters but not in this podcast) that the Labor Department had announced the loss of 68,000 jobs in December. The correct figure is 85,000 jobs lost last month. I apologize for the error.

For more information:

• Statement: President Obama Announces Proposal to Accelerate Job Growth
• National Federation of Independent Business
• The Conference Board
• Release: NASE Opposes Senate Health Reform Bill