Will Obama's jobs bill work?

President Obama  signed a bill yesterday designed to prod small businesses to hire more workers. Will it work?

I ran the three main points of Obama's program, as he described it in Washington, past Nicholas Crocetti, a director in the 200-person Plymouth Meeting office of the national business-services firm CBIZ Inc., which does the taxes for hundreds of family-owned suburban companies.

   Obama: "First, we'll forgive payroll taxes for businesses that hire someone who's been out of work for at least two months."
   Crocetti: "The bill doesn't eliminate all of the payroll taxes. But it eliminates the employer's share of the Social Security tax, which is 6.2 percent."
   That means a boss who was going to hire 15 people anyway, can pay a 16th at no extra charge, for a year. "That's a very positive step," Crocetti added.

   Obama: "Second, this job bill encourages smaller businesses to grow and hire by permitting them to write off investments [of] up to $250,000, in, say, factory equipment, and write it off right away."
   Crocetti: That's an old Bush-era tax cut. "It was supposed to expire in 2010. All they did was extend it. It's helpful."

   Obama: "Third, we'll reform municipal bonds to encourage job creation by expanding investment in schools and clean energy projects."
   (As I noted here yesterday, Congress is also leaning on bond-rating agencies to go easy on towns and states, so they can borrow more money, cheap.)
   Crocetti: "It's nice to give these away, but Congress and the administration are not paying attention to the financing. Who's going to fund all this?"   (From my PhillyDeals column in today's print Inquirer)