Americans Are Taking Fewer Vacation Days Than At Any Point In Nearly 4 Decades

WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Americans took the least amount of vacation time in almost four decades last year, forfeiting billions of dollars in compensation without scoring points with their bosses, according to an industry group analysis released on Tuesday.

The report for the U.S. Travel Association said the average American with paid time off (PTO) used 16 of 20.9 vacation days in 2013, down from an average of 20.3 days off from 1976 to 2000. It added that 169 million days of permanently forfeited U.S. vacation time equated to $52.4 billion in lost benefits.

"By choosing to work instead of taking PTO, employees are essentially working for their employers for free," the analysis said.

The report did not give a reason for the drop in vacation time but the fall coincided with the 2007-2009 recession and a slow economic recovery. An Ipsos/Reuters survey in 2010 found that only 57 percent of Americans used all their vacation time.

Wealthier workers tend to earn more vacation days, and also leave more of it on the table, according to the study. People with an annual income of more than $150,000 failed to use an average of 6.5 vacation days last year, while those with less than $29,000 did not use 3.7 days on average.

Employees who foreited paid time off do not get more raises or bonuses than those who take all their vacation time. They also report higher levels of stress at work, the survey said.

"America's work martyrs aren't more successful. We need to change our thinking. All work and no play is not going to get you ahead - it's only going to get you more stress," Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, said in a statement accompanying the report.

The analysis was prepared by Oxford Economics, a forecasting group. It used Labor Department data and a June survey of 1,303 workers by GfK Public Affairs and Corporate Communications in conjunction with Oxford Economics.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Alan Crosby)

All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone

Here's more proof the middle class is dying.

The middle-class share of American wealth has been shrinking for the better part of three decades and recently fell to its lowest level since 1940, according to a new study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics.

In other words, remember the surge of the great American middle class after World War II? That's all gone, at least by one measure.

In this case, "middle class" is defined rather expansively as the bottom 90 percent of all Americans. "Wealth" is the total of home equity, stock and bond holdings, pension plans and other assets, minus debt. As such assets are mostly owned by mid- to higher-income households -- and considering most Americans define themselves as "middle-class" -- it seems reasonable to use the bottom 90 percent as a proxy for the "middle class."

Saez and Zucman discussed their paper in a blog post for the Washington Center For Equitable Growth on Monday that included this stark chart:

Debt has been the big force driving net wealth lower for the middle class, according to Saez and Zucman. Brief bubbles in stock and home prices in the 1990s and 2000s only temporarily offset the steady, depressing rise in mortgage, student-loan, credit-card and other debts for the bottom 90 percent.

"Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before," Saez and Zucman wrote.

Another important factor has been that incomes have stagnated for most Americans over the past few decades, once adjusted for inflation. Along with rising debt levels, stagnant wages have made it impossible for most families to save very much money.

And who has been the beneficiary of this middle-class misery? The top 0.1 percent of Americans, whose incomes have just kept rising, and whose share of wealth has soared to levels not seen since Jay Gatsby was still staring at the blinking green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock:

In fact, the middle class is not alone in suffering from shrinking wealth. The rest of the top 10 percent of Americans below the 0.1 percent -- the "merely rich," Saez and Zucman call them -- have also suffered from falling household wealth over the past four decades.

This rising inequality of wealth can only lead to more inequality of income and wealth in the future, Saez and Zucman warned, echoing French economist Thomas Piketty. The very rich will just keep getting richer by living on the returns from their wealth, while the rest of us will keep falling behind.

Rick Perry Lost Big With Tesla Deal

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's charms were apparently lost on electric carmaker Tesla.

Despite Perry's shoddy record on clean energy, the former Republican presidential candidate desperately wanted Tesla to build its $5 billion battery factory in the Lone Star State. Perry personally led negotiations with Tesla over its so-called Gigafactory, which is expected to create 6,500 jobs. The governor even drove a Tesla Model S through California’s state capital in June, in a public stunt that the Los Angeles Times found surmountable to “stalking.”

“Tesla’s a big project,” Perry said during an interview with “Opening Bell” on Fox Business News in March. “I think the cachet of being able to say we put that manufacturing facility in our state is hard to pass up.”

All for naught. On Thursday, Tesla settled on Nevada as the location for its $5 billion 'Gigafactory,' ending a monthslong contest with Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Tesla’s home state of California.

“It’s disappointing; he’s got to face it as a disappointment,” Peter Cowen, the managing director of technology investment banking firm Clear Capital Advisors, told The Huffington Post on Friday. “This one was a high-stakes battle and he lost.”

Part of the problem for Perry was a Texas law that bans car manufacturers from selling directly to customers. Because Tesla doesn't franchise its dealerships, it can't sell cars in the state. Though Perry said in March he wanted to lift the ban, it still proved to be a turn-off for the carmaker.

The ban “doesn’t make us feel good as we look to build a plant" in Texas, Diarmuid O’Connell, vice president of business development for Tesla, told The Huffington Post in June. O’Connell said economics would ultimately sway the company's decision.

A Tesla spokeswoman did not respond to a question about whether the continued sales ban factored into its decision, instead forwarding along quotes from CEO Elon Musk's press conference in Carson City, Nevada, on Thursday.

Perry had cause for hope. Earlier this year, he convinced Toyota to move its headquarters from California to suburban Dallas. Texas has a state Enterprise Fund, established by Perry in 2003, to serve as a “deal-closing” coffer from which officials can draw to bolster Texas’s business bids in interstate competitions. To boot, Texas has no corporate income tax.

Texas residents may have lucked out, as added incentives from the state could have ended up costing taxpayers. As it was, Texas was offering a tax package worth between $800 million and $900 million, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Nevada is coughing up $1.3 billion to seal its deal with the carmaker.

A spokesman for Perry’s office did not immediately respond to a call requesting comment.

Why Tesla picked Nevada is not totally clear. Musk said the reasons went beyond money.

“This was not the biggest incentive package, it wasn’t just about the incentives,” Musk said at the press conference. “What the people of Nevada have created is a state where you can be very agile, where you can move quickly and get things done.”

That may mean geography worked in Nevada’s favor. The ideal location for the company was probably California: It's Tesla's biggest market and fairly close to western Canada, where Tesla may soon begin getting some of its raw materials, according to Carter Driscoll, a senior analyst at the investment bank MLV & Co who covers Tesla.

The Golden State wasn't able to come up with an incentives packages on deadline, however. So neighboring Nevada may have proved the next best thing. Plus, there were those massive tax breaks. Perry can't win 'em all.

24 Years Of America's Unemployment Rate In 10 Seconds

The 2009 financial crisis wreaked havoc on American workers. This map gives a sense of just how dramatic its effect was on employment.

The map, created by data designer 'Metric Maps' and originally posted to Reddit, uses county-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to depict the annual unemployment rate for every county in the U.S. from 1990 to 2013. Relatively low unemployment in the late '90s and early 2000s gives way to an explosion of red (denoting counties with an unemployment rate of 8 percent or greater) in 2009 following the crash.

Check it out below:

McDonald's Says Russian Officials Shut Down 12 Locations

MOSCOW, Aug 29 (Reuters) - McDonald's said on Friday that a total of 12 of its branches in Russia had been temporarily closed over the state food safety regulator's allegations of sanitary violations.

The U.S. fast-food chain, which has 440 restaurants in the country, also said that more than 100 inspections were underway at its restaurants in various regions of Russia.

"We are studying the essence of claims in order to determine the necessary actions for the swift re-opening of restaurants for visitors," it said in a statement. (Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Pravin Char)

From Wednesday:

MOSCOW, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Russian courts on Wednesday backed the temporary closure of three McDonald's restaurants in Moscow for breaches of sanitary rules, amid a standoff with the West over Ukraine, while the state food safety watchdog suspended work at a fourth.

The three restaurants - on Moscow's Manezh square, under the walls of the Kremlin, at Pushkin Square and on Prospect Mira - have been closed since last week on the orders of the watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor. The court rulings confirmed that decision.

Rospotrebnadzor has introduced sweeping checks, including unscheduled inspections, at McDonald's restaurants across the country.

On Wednesday it ordered the temporary closure of a fourth branch in the capital - the sixth nationwide.

Russian businessmen have said the crackdown is linked to the crisis over Ukraine, which has soured U.S.-Russian relations and led to a round of sanctions and trade restrictions. Rospotrebnadzor has denied that its actions are politically motivated.

McDonald's said it would appeal the court rulings, which ordered the three Moscow branches to be closed for 90 days.

"We do not agree with the courts' decisions and will appeal them according to established procedures. We will continue to take care of our employees and do everything we can to continue successful operations in Russia," said a spokeswoman for the U.S. firm in Russia.

A lawyer representing McDonald's in the court, Maksim Titarenko, was also quoted as saying the courts' decisions to close the branches were unjustified.

"The court has ordered the maximum penalty under this article of the administrative offenses code although there are no grounds for it," Interfax news agency quoted Titarenko as saying.

A court in the Urals region delivered a similar ruling on Wednesday when it ordered the closure of a McDonald's restaurant in the city of Yekaterinburg for 85 days, backing the food safety watchdog's decision the day before.

McDonald's operates 440 restaurants in Russia and considers the country one of its top seven markets outside the United States and Canada, according to its 2013 annual report. Almost 1 million people a day visit its restaurants in Russia. (Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Additional reporting by Natalia Shurmina in Yekaterinburg; Editing by Louise Heavens and Pravin Char)

Some Insurers Ignore Obamacare, Refuse To Cover Birth Control

Provided by Kaiser Health News.

How much leeway do employers and insurers have in deciding whether they’ll cover contraceptives without charge and in determining which methods make the cut?

Not much, as it turns out, but that hasn’t stopped some from trying.

Kaiser Health News readers still write in regularly describing battles they’re waging to get the birth control coverage they’re entitled to.

In one of those messages recently, a woman said her insurer denied free coverage for the NuvaRing. This small plastic device, which is inserted into the vagina, works for three weeks at a time by releasing hormones similar to those used by birth control pills. She said her insurer told her she would be responsible for her contraceptive expenses unless she chooses an oral generic birth control pill. The NuvaRing costs between $15 and $80 a month, according to Planned Parenthood.

Under the health law, health plans have to cover the full range of FDA-approved birth control methods without any cost sharing by women, unless the plan falls into a limited number of categories that are excluded, either because it’s grandfathered under the law or it’s for is a religious employer or house of worship. Following the recent Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case, some private employers that have religious objections to providing birth control coverage as a free preventive benefit will also be excused from the requirement.

In addition, the federal government has given plans some flexibility by allowing them to use "reasonable medical management techniques" to keep their costs under control. So if there is both a generic and a brand-name version of a birth-control pill available, for example, a plan could decide to cover only the generic version without cost to the patient.

As for the NuvaRing, even though they may use the same hormones, the pill and the ring are different methods of birth control. As an official from the federal Department of Health and Human Services said in an email, "The pill, the ring and the patch are different types of hormonal methods … It is not permissible to cover only the pill, but not the ring or the patch."

Guidance from the federal government clearly states that the full range of FDA-approved methods of birth control must be covered as a preventive benefit without cost sharing. That includes birth control pills, the ring or patch, intrauterine devices and sterilization, among others.

But despite federal guidance, “we’ve seen this happen, plenty,” says Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and education organization. “Clearly insurance companies think things are ambiguous enough that they can get away with it.”

If you are denied coverage, your defense is to appeal the decision, and get your state insurance department involved.

“The state has the right and responsibility to enforce this law,” says Sonfield.

Store Employee Ties Elderly Man's Shoe Strings (And Tugs At Our Heartstrings) In Viral Pic

One simple act of kindness is catching the attention of thousands of people online.

Keith Kiel of Ormond Beach, Florida, was shopping at a Publix grocery store last week when he spotted an employee there in the midst of a good deed, according to a post on his Facebook page.

The employee, Gage Boucher, was assisting an elderly man who could not bend over to tie his shoe. Boucher quickly helped the man by bending down and tying both shoes for him. Kiel snapped a photo of the act on his iPhone and uploaded it to Facebook. In less than a week, the photo has received thousands of likes and shares.

Post by Keith Kiel.

The man then tried to pay Boucher, who refused to accept it, according to Fox 4 News. Kiel was moved by the scene, and hoped to bring recognition to the employee by posting the photo.

As for Boucher, he says he wants his deed to inspire others to be kind.

"Just like, do it, I guess. Just start being kind," he told Fox 4 News. "If you see someone who needs help, just help them out."

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