A Year After The Stimulus Plan: What About Small Businesses?

You would have to live under a rock to not have heard about the stimulus plan from last year, and the Billions of Dollars that was given to huge corporations. $787 Billion to be precise.

So...what of the little guy? What kind of help did the small business sectors end up with in this whole thing? The simple answer is: Little to nothing.

Entrepreneur.com interviewed a small businesses that has done a lot of government contracts over the years and asked how much of that money they ahve seen.

Veronica Rose, founder and CEO of Aurora Electric, a Jamaica, N.Y., electrical contracting company, has spent nearly 20 years successfully bidding on government contracts. She says about the stimulus money:

"We haven't seen any of it," Rose says. "The stimulus money went to the big infrastructure companies that build highways and bridges--the bigger, deeper, heavier part of our industry where you have to be a big company in order to compete."

Apparently, she is not alone in being held out of the prize pool. A year after the government rolled out the biggest economic stimulus plan in history, small businesses like Rose's are wondering where the money went and why so little of it came their way. While VC-backed startups like Tesla Motors, the Palo Alto, Calif., company that makes electric cars, got a $465 million taxpayer loan, most of the stimulus dollars have ended up in the pockets of big companies that employ thousands of workers, not the millions of small businesses like Rose's that each employ only a handful. In fact, much of the stimulus money has gone to government agencies, bypassing the private sector completely.

Logically, you can't really argue with money going to companies that employ thousands of people. It just has a bigger impact on more people than a small business in most cases. The government institutions raking in cash is a bit unnerving I guess. Never know where that went. Probably for a new dream gym full of high end fitness equipment, or 424234 iPhones sitting in boxes int eh basement.

According to a recent analysis by The Wall Street Journal, $112 billion of the $179 billion in stimulus funds shelled out last year went to state governments to plug the gaps in education, Medicaid and unemployment benefits budgets or to boost funding for food stamps and other social services programs. An additional $700 million was spent on administration, and about $47 billion went toward transfer payments, such as $250 checks for Social Security recipients. Some $70 billion in social spending is in the pipeline already, the Journal reported, including grants for local organizations conducting job training programs.