From Citi's Tobias Levkovitch this morning, a simple line on the silliness of thinking tax cuts will incentivize hiring:

"Whatever temporary or even longer- lasting tax incentives offered, it is terribly difficult to convince employers to add workers they don’t need."

We touched on this this weekend in this post.

So mostly, Levkovitch is pretty pessimistic that Obama and Congress could possibly agree on anything that's demand-inducing.

Here's the most optimistic note he can muster on this front:

As noted, with so little cohesion between the parties, it is unlikely that proposals will pass that could add up to a new, stronger economic forecast and thus significantly alter estimates of labor demand. Yet such is not impossible. Even in the framework of the recent agreement, the Federal debt ceiling can be raised in phases by as much as $2.4 trillion through the end of 2012 when little more than $1.7 trillion might be necessary. The difference between the two figures could be used for substantial outright expansion of the payroll tax cut, adding cuts to the employer’s portion of that bill, or some entirely different steps. But as with the whole outlook for fiscal policy over a longer period, polarization makes passage of bold new steps quite unlikely.