Will Job-Creation Tax Credit work?

The answer to that question is what this Time article sets to discover. That is why it gained a recommended read, a few of the points raised:

At issue, though, is how many companies would actually deserve the tax credit. Nearly 12 months after Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, and in the wake of a homebuyer tax credit and Cash for Clunkers, economists and others are paying more attention to the collateral cost of stimulus. The question with this proposal is how many of the million companies that Obama predicts would be awarded a job-creation tax credit would have hired workers anyway.

"It sounds good because it's for small businesses and job creation," says economist Dean Baker of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. "But basically, you are paying companies to hire workers that would have been hired even if you hadn't handed out tax breaks."