Obama: Is He Helping Or Hurting Your Business?

Obama: Is He Helping Or Hurting Your Business?: "Timothy Shea has been providing IT solutions for 21 years and has never worked as hard or felt as much economic pressure.

Shea, CEO and senior consultant at Alpha NetSolutions, a solution provider based in Marlborough, Mass., says his income as the owner of an 'S' corporation that files a personal tax return has dropped 25 percent from 2007 to 2009. At the same time, the health-care costs for his eight-employee, $1.2 million business have doubled over the past three years.

Shea is one of many small-business solution providers interviewed for this cover story who feel that federal economic policies negatively affected business during that period. What's more, these solution providers say, looking ahead they don't see how the successful passage of President Barack Obama's landmark health-care reform bill, which Obama signed into law on March 23, will help.

Shea is one of tens of thousands of small-business IT solution providers in the U.S., working in a field that for decades has created almost unimaginable personal wealth and countless jobs. But over the past year, many of these businesses have closed their doors and many more are struggling in the midst of what by all accounts is the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression."