Business and Financial News: December 2014

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Minimum Wage Hikes Force Walmart To Raise Pay At More Than 1,400 Stores

By Nathan Layne

CHICAGO, Dec 24 (Reuters) - Minimum wage increases across the United States will prompt Wal-Mart Stores Inc to adjust base salaries at 1,434 stores, impacting about a third of its U.S. locations, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters.

The memo, which was sent to store managers earlier this month, offers insight into the impact of minimum wage hikes in 21 states due to come into effect on or around Jan. 1, 2015.

These are adjustments that Wal-Mart and other employers have to make each year, but growing attention to the issue has expanded the scope of the change. Thirteen U.S. states lifted the minimum wage in 2014, up from 10 in 2013 and 8 in 2012.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said the company was making the changes to "ensure our stores in the 21 states comply with the law."

For Wal-Mart, the biggest private employer in the United States with 1.3 million workers, minimum wage legislation is not a small thing. Its operating model is built on keeping costs under close control as it attracts consumers with low prices and operates on tight margins.

In recent years, it has been struggling to grow sales after many lower-income Americans lost jobs or income in the financial crisis.

The Wal-Mart memo shows that there will be changes to its pay structure, including a narrowing of the gap in the minimum premium paid to those in higher skilled positions, such as deli associates and department supervisors, over lower grade jobs.

Wal-Mart will also combine its lowest three pay grades, which include cashiers, cart pushers and maintenance, into one base rate.

The changes appear in part to be an effort to offset the anticipated upswing in labor costs, according to a manager who was implementing the changes at his store.

"Essentially that wage compression at the upper level of the hourly associate is going to help absorb that cost of the wage increase at the lower level," said the manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

MORE CHANGE TO COME?

Wal-Mart's critics - including a group of its workers backed by labor unions - say the retailer pays its hourly workers too little, forcing some to seek government assistance that effectively provides the company with an indirect taxpayer subsidy. Labor groups have been calling for Wal-Mart, other retailers and fast-food chains to pay at least $15 an hour.

Wal-Mart has indicated it may make more changes to its compensation structure in 2015. Chief Executive Doug McMillon recently said the company would improve opportunities for workers, including getting the roughly 6,000 people who make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour at its stores off that rate.

"In the world there is a debate over inequity, and sometimes we get caught up in that," he told TV presenter Charlie Rose in an interview this month. McMillon said he would take steps to ensure the company is "a meritocracy, an opportunity for people to do more."

The state minimum wage changes range from a 17 percent increase in South Dakota to $8.50 to a modest rise of 2 percent to $8.05 in Arizona. They will also impact many of Wal-Mart's big retail rivals, such as Target Corp, and fast-food chains like McDonald's Corp.

A Target spokeswoman said she could not provide details on how many employees might be impacted by the changes on Jan. 1. McDonald's could not be immediately reached for comment.

Wal-Mart estimates its average full-time hourly wage is $12.92, and says that it pays competitive wages and offers its employees ample opportunity for advancement.

Edward Jones analyst Brian Yarbrough said it is tough to estimate the cost impact of the minimum wage changes without knowing the number of Wal-Mart employees affected. While many employees might start out at the minimum rate, they advance to higher pay rates over time, he noted.

Wal-Mart said last month that investment in wages and higher health care costs drove a 3.5 percent increase in operating expenses in its most recent quarter. Wal-Mart is unlikely to cut staff or reduce hours to keep those costs in check, given that it has made a renewed push to improve service in its stores, Yarbrough said. (Reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Martin Howell)

Minimum Wage Hikes Force Walmart To Raise Pay At More Than 1,400 Stores

Tesla To Reveal Upgrade To Original Roadster This Week

Tesla Motors is slated to unveil a much-anticipated upgrade to its original electric sports car this week.

CEO Elon Musk vowed on Friday to reveal details of the update to the Roadster, which was discontinued in 2011. It's unclear what improvements the electric carmaker will offer, but in an August interview with the U.K.'s Auto Express, Musk promised to upgrade the car's battery, extending its range from about 245 miles to 400 miles per charge.

"The Roadster has an old generation battery," he said in August. "We'll upgrade it to a new generation battery pack and it should have a range of about 400 miles, which will allow you to drive from LA to San Francisco non-stop."

Musk said in a tweet to an Austrian electric car enthusiast that several crises delayed the upgrade.

@tweethilli Roadster update details coming next week. Several crisis issues w higher priority pushed this out longer than expected.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2014

Tesla spokeswoman Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean confirmed that the update would be announced this week, but did not specify which day. The actual upgrade to the Roadster will occur at a later date.

Tesla has struggled in recent months, following a summer-long stock surge. Last month, falling oil prices, weak November sales and delays in the rollout of its Model X sports utility vehicle hammered the stock. Upgrades to Tesla's main assembly line "took longer than expected," Musk said in a third-quarter earnings call last month, causing the Model X to be pushed back yet again.

The bleeding didn't stop there. In October, Michigan passed a law banning direct sales of Tesla, a controversial regulation already in effect in New Jersey, Texas, Arizona and Maryland. Backed by car dealership associations, the law prevents car manufacturers from selling vehicles directly to consumers. Because Tesla does not franchise its retail department, sales of its cars are effectively banned in those states.

Tesla stock was up to about $221 on Tuesday morning after hitting a low last week.

But last Friday, Tesla debuted a new battery swap program at a Supercharger station in California. In about 90 seconds, Tesla can replace the charging pack in a Model S sedan, elongating the distance a driver can travel in the car without relying on lengthy charging sessions at a Supercharger plug-in point. The new swap feature may work with the Roadster, which first debuted in 2008.

In the meantime, Musk -- like many gearing up for Christmas -- seems to have focused his attention on sugary sweets.

Really should be a rule that oatmeal-raisin cookies can't look too much like choc chip. DoppelgÃ¤nger cookie trickery!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2014

Nothing against all the oatmeal-raisin cookies out there. Just be yourself.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2014

What A Fired Qdoba Worker Tells Us About The Fast Food Strikes

WASHINGTON -- On Dec. 4, Rosa Velasquez went on strike to protest low wages in the fast food industry. The following day, the 52-year-old grandmother lost her job at a Qdoba restaurant inside the Pentagon.

Velasquez says the greatest indignity wasn't being fired from her $8.75-per-hour position. It was being publicly escorted out of the food court by police at her manager's request, as if she had broken the law.

"They humiliated me," the Honduras native told The Huffington Post, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter.

Velasquez's situation tells us a lot about the fast food strikes that have cropped up in cities across the country over the past few years, with workers demanding, among other things, a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Detractors have dismissed these protests as little more than union-orchestrated stunts, filled with labor activists rather than actual workers. Unions, meanwhile, have tried to publicly keep their distance from the strikes, in an effort to make them look organic.

In reality, though, the worker strikes are not stunts, nor are they spontaneous. Real workers like Velasquez are at the center of this campaign, taking the risks that give the strikes meaning. Unions, for their part, are standing behind the workers with the institutional support that makes the strikes possible.

Velasquez is a mother of three and grandmother of four, and has no history as a rabble-rouser. During her 18 years living in the United States, she's bounced from one low-income job to the next, from cleaning offices and homes to prepping Mexican food. All the while, her wages have tracked closely with the country's minimum wage, which has not been keeping pace with inflation. But earlier this year, through some of her colleagues at Qdoba, Velasquez fell in with a worker group called Good Jobs Nation.

For two years, Good Jobs Nation has been organizing low-wage workers under federal contracts to demand higher pay, better benefits and union representation. The group is backed by several labor groups, including the Service Employees International Union, a powerful union of nearly 2 million members and the leading organizer of the ongoing fast food strikes.

Why, after nearly two decades in low-wage America, would Velasquez now put her name on a strike notice that was headed to her boss's desk? Because she'd never seen workers speaking out like this before, she said.

"I got involved because some of my co-workers got involved," Velasquez explained. "My co-workers don't earn enough to live. We need better wages. We need better benefits."

According to Velasquez's account of events, she skipped her scheduled shift on Dec. 4 to attend one of a number of fast food protests that took place around the country that day. Good Jobs Nation says it gave a written notice to her Qdoba location, informing the restaurant which workers would be taking part in the strike. The group considers such strikes legally protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that lays out collective bargaining rights.

But at work the next morning, Velasquez alleges, her boss told her she no longer had a job and pulled her name tag from her shirt.

Velasquez says she sat in the restaurant's office and cried. Her manager came back with a colleague who could translate, she said, who told her she had to leave. A Pentagon police officer soon showed up to walk her out of the building.

It's unclear what the precise rationale was behind Velasquez's dismissal. A manager at the Qdoba restaurant told HuffPost he would not comment on the firing. A Qdoba spokeswoman said the company wasn't aware of the incident, pointing out that the location in question is franchised, and not actually run by the Mexican food chain. The president of the company that franchises the location, Seven Hills Restaurant Group, which also operates several other Pentagon eateries, did not respond to two calls seeking comment.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed, however, that a Qdoba manager called the police on Dec. 5 about a fired employee. "The manager informed [police] that he just terminated the employment of one his staff, and that the employee was not leaving the premises," the spokesman said in an email. He added that Velasquez cooperated with the escort and "there were no issues."

SEIU has downplayed its role in the fast food strikes such as the one that preceded Velasquez's firing. The union has remained largely behind the scenes and deflected press inquiries to the workers themselves. But as Velasquez's story shows, workers couldn't strike with any confidence without the legal backing afforded by something like a labor union. If the strikes don't seem purely organic, it's because they can't be.

Shortly after Velasquez was fired, the legal team at Good Jobs Nation filed what's known as an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that enforces labor law. In the charge, the group accuses Seven Hills of illegally retaliating against Velasquez for taking part in a strike. If the labor board finds merit in the claim, it can force Seven Hills to the negotiating table and possibly win reinstatement and back pay for Velasquez.

Good Jobs Nation has already had some success battling Seven Hills in front of the NLRB. In May, the worker group pressured Seven Hills into a settlement in which the company agreed to pay $205 in back pay to a worker at a different Pentagon eatery. In the same settlement, the restaurant also reimbursed workers for free lunches they had been denied for two weeks. The settlement document indicates that the employees customarily received lunch at work, but were stripped of the privilege, allegedly as a punishment.

In addition, Seven Hills agreed to post a two-page notice at the restaurant in question for 60 days, laying out all the ways in which the company promised not to violate workers' rights. (Good Jobs Nation claims Velasquez's firing was in violation of this agreement.) It was just the sort of outcome that gives workers like Velasquez enough assurance to take part in future strikes, but it couldn't have happened without robust legal work on behalf of Good Jobs Nation and its backers.

So far, Good Jobs Nation's efforts have yielded some concrete returns. In their early protests, workers with the group called on the Obama administration to issue an executive order setting a minimum wage for workers employed under federal contracts. Within months, the president promised to sign just such an order, even putting the proposal at the center of his State of the Union address. Later, he announced a different executive order that would strip contracts from companies found to have committed wage theft -- another proposal that Good Jobs Nation had championed.

Now the group is calling on the White House to issue yet another order, one that would give contracting preference to so-called "model employers" that pay at least $15 per hour and offer benefits. Progressive members of the House of Representatives have taken up the cause.

As for Velasquez, she has a more immediate goal in mind.

"I want to go back to work at Qdoba," she said, "and show my co-workers that I was fired unfairly."

Hurry Up! Big Obamacare Deadline Coming Monday

The first Obamacare enrollment deadline for next year is just three days away, meaning Monday is the last day for people in most states who buy their own health insurance to choose a plan they can begin using Jan. 1.

If you're already a customer of a plan selected from a health insurance exchange marketplace or directly from an insurance provider, or if you're uninsured now and looking for coverage for the beginning of the year, there's no more time to waste. Here's are some don't's and do's that last-minute health insurance consumers should consider before the deadline in your home states.

"Don't wait until Sunday. Don't wait until Monday after work," said DeAnn Friedholm, the health care reform campaign director at Consumers Union. "It is complicated."

Don't delay!

If you're one of these people and don't visit HealthCare.gov or your state's exchange, you won't be able to get a new plan until February, and the last chance to choose a plan for any part of next year is Feb. 15 (except under special circumstances). Five state's exchanges have different deadlines: Dec. 18 in Maryland and Dec. 23 in Idaho, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington state. These deadlines only apply to people who buy health insurance through an exchange, a broker or directly from an insurer -- not those who get health benefits from their jobs or a government program like Medicare or Medicaid.

There are a lot of factors to consider, like what doctors and hospitals you can access, what drugs and medical services are covered, how much you'll have to pay out of pocket when you get health care, and what the monthly premium is. Sorry -- there will be some math.

To prepare, you should have some information and documentation handy, like your family members' Social Security numbers and last year's tax returns or something else to verify your income, which is how subsidies are calculated.

Don't Stand Pat!

Maybe you got a really good deal on the health insurance you have now, and you like it, so you figure you're all set. While it's true that the health insurance exchanges in most states (check with the exchange to find out about where you live) will automatically roll you into the same plan for next year if it's still available, there are a lot of good reasons shop around.

"Don't assume because you have something from last year that it's still the best value for you," Friedholm said. "There are real savings here to be had for many, many people." The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than 70 percent of current Obamacare enrollees could save money next year by switching to a new plan with a similar level of coverage.

Monthly premiums for exchange policies are going up and down all over the place and there are new plans on the marketplaces. It's smart to check whether you can find something more affordable.

Don't assume you don't qualify for financial assistance: 85 percent of this year's Obamacare enrollees did, and tax credits are available to people who earn up to four times the federal poverty level, or about $94,000 for a family of four.

For those who get subsidies, shopping is crucial because of the complicated way the tax credits are calculated. The value of the subsidy is linked to the cost of the so-called benchmark plan in every geographic area, and those prices went down in many places. These lower premiums mean smaller subsidies. Even if the sticker price for your current plan isn't going up much, you could end up paying much more by not finding a less expensive alternative because your tax credits will be worth less. (Read a more detailed explanation here.)

If you are automatically renewed into your existing plan and get a scary bill for January, you can switch to something else for the rest of the year, but you're stuck with that plan for at least a month (unless you cancel it outright and go without coverage).

It's also vital to visit HealthCare.gov or a state exchange to update your household's income information. If you expect your income to rise and you and don't notify the exchange, you may have to pay back part of your subsidy.

Do Your Research!

The plan you have now may have changed in ways other than price. Your doctor or hospital may not be in the network anymore, or may be available through a different plan. The amount you pay when you get health care may be different, as might the services the policy covers. The journalism nonprofit ProPublica created a useful tool that helps you compare benefits in this year's insurance plans with next year's. Find it here.

The trickiest thing about choosing insurance is finding a balance between a decent monthly premium while not exposing yourself to out-of-pocket costs like deductibles and copayments you can't afford. For example, if you know you'll have frequent or big-ticket health care needs next year, it may make sense to pay a higher monthly premium so your out-of-pocket costs are lower, Friedholm said.

Do Ask For Help!

To get information about the basics, like what health insurance jargon means or what factors you should consider when choosing a plan, try the Consumer Reports Health Law Helper. The exchanges also have telephone hotlines, and can direct you to in-person help at no cost in your community. Private insurance brokers also can assist consumers at no charge.

To see an estimate of how much your health insurance might cost, use this calculator from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misreported the deadlines in five states. The post has been updated.

Burger King's Move To Canada Could Save It $275 Million In Taxes

By Kevin Drawbaugh

WASHINGTON, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Fast food chain Burger King will avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxes if, as planned, it completes its pending buyout of Canadian coffee-and-doughnuts chain Tim Hortons, a tax activist group said on Thursday.

In one of the most notable of several corporate tax "inversion" deals this year, Florida-based Burger King announced in late August it would buy Tim Hortons and put the headquarters of the combined company in Canada.

U.S. companies doing inversions - which involve buying a foreign company and assuming its tax nationality to cut overall tax costs - have been blasted as tax dodgers by Democrats and liberal groups. President Barack Obama has criticized a "herd mentality" by companies seeking deals to escape U.S. taxes.

In a report that Burger King described as "flawed," Americans for Tax Fairness, a group often critical of corporations over taxes, said the fast-food chain's inversion "creates substantial tax avoidance opportunities."

For instance, it said, by placing its headquarters in Canada so it is no longer a U.S. company for tax purposes, Burger King could avoid $117 million in U.S. taxes by never having to pay corporate income tax on foreign profits it holds offshore.

The group said Burger King's future foreign profits would no longer be subject to U.S. income taxes. That could save the company about $275 million from 2015 to 2018, based on a range of Wall Street earnings projections, it said.

Burger King said in a statement: "The analysis in the report is materially flawed and the figures do not accurately represent our facts and circumstances. As we've said all along, this transaction is driven by growth, not tax rates. Going forward, we do not expect our tax rate to change materially."

A company spokesman declined to respond point-by-point to the report. The spokesman said the Burger King-Tim Hortons transaction will be completed on Friday.

Tim Hortons said on Tuesday its shareholders approved the deal, with the combined company to be called Restaurant Brands International. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

The report said Burger King is a top food supplier to the U.S. armed forces and its "decision to become a Canadian company will mean that while U.S. military families support Burger King by buying its food, Burger King will no longer support service members by paying its fair share of taxes." (Additional reporting by Solarina Ho in Toronto; Editing by Will Dunham and Cynthia Osterman)

Fast Food Protesters Take To The Streets On 2-Year Anniversary Of Campaign

NEW YORK -- The fast food protests that have swept the nation in recent years, including demonstrations in dozens of cities on Thursday, introduced Americans to thousands of people like Flavia Cabral.

Cabral, 53, is the sole breadwinner for her Bronx family. Her husband is unemployed, so she splits her time between working at a Manhattan McDonald’s and a shipping company. Despite working two jobs, she brings home just $370 a week, far less than roughly $1,600 a week it takes to get by in New York City in a home with two parents and one kid, according to the Economic Policy Institute's family budget calculator.

“I’m the one who feeds my family, and even working two jobs, it’s not enough,” said Cabral. She was standing outside of a Burger King here Thursday morning as protesters took over the restaurant inside, drumming and chanting for a $15-an-hour wage and a union. This is Cabral’s third protest, she said, and she keeps showing up because “I believe we’re going to win. As many times as we have to do it, we’re going to to do it.”

Left: Protesters hold signs inside a Brooklyn Burger King, including some that reference the controversy over the recent deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Right: A sign on the door of the eatery noting that it's open on Christmas Day.

Thursday’s protests, which activists say will hit 190 cities nationwide, mark the two-year anniversary of the fast food campaign. It's hard to point to concrete wins for the union-backed movement -- fast food workers' median pay hovers between $8 and $9 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other studies, and union membership remains near historic lows.

Still, the demonstrations have grabbed Americans' attention, making more people aware of a large and growing a class of workers -- like Cabral -- who are struggling to get by.

“It’s become much more current to talk about the working poor,” said Gary Chaison, a labor relations professor at Clark University’s Graduate School of Management.

Indeed, national headlines have chronicled the effects of unpredictable scheduling, unaffordable child care and a dearth of paid sick days on low-wage workers. Ballot measures to increase the minimum wage achieved widespread success, even in red states, during the midterm elections. President Barack Obama gave fast food workers a shout-out in a speech to labor activists earlier this year, telling them that “America deserves a raise.”

Obama has also been a vocal advocate of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Earlier this year, he set $10.10 as the wage floor for federal contractors.

“All of those things are things that you never saw discussed in public” before the protests, said Ileen DeVault, a professor at Cornell University's school of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Fast food workers have succeeded largely because their issues are so relatable. It’s easy to sympathize with the person serving you a burger and fries once you learn about their low pay and poor working conditions, DeVault said.

Organizers have capitalized on that success, using it to bring attention to low-wage workers in other industries. On Thursday, home health aides and airport workers joined the fast food protests. Standing inside the Burger King packed with protesters and signs here, one airport worker bemoaned the fact that he’s struggling during the holidays to support six kids on a salary that's close to the minimum wage.

Abera Siyoum, a disability cart operator at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, said in an interview earlier this week that he planned to support the protesters. His wife stays home to take care of their two kids, ages 2 and 4, because childcare is too expensive. That leaves Siyoum to earn all of the money for his family. He wakes up at 3 a.m. and often doesn’t get home until 8 p.m. after working at the airport and at another job as a security officer.

“[Fast food workers] are working under the same conditions. I just want to join them because if we fight together, I think we can win together,” he said.

Protesters hold up a sign calling attention to airport workers at a Brooklyn Burger King Thursday.

In addition to showing solidarity, bringing in workers from other industries adds a level of legitimacy to the fast food protests and sheds some light on other elements of the shadow low-wage workforce, said Clark University's Chaison. “People who are on the margins of the labor force are now being talked about,” he said.

Of course, the immediate target of the protesters is still the fast food giants themselves. Demonstrators argue the chains can afford to pay their workers more. The Shake Shack next door to the Burger King here provided a stark contrast. Shake Shack pays a median wage of $10.70 an hour, according to a recent New York Times story highlighting its labor practices.

Representatives from both McDonald’s and Burger King noted in statements that their restaurants are largely owned by franchisees and that they pay fair and competitive wages.

"As a corporation, Burger King Corp. (BKC) respects the rights of all workers," the company said in a statement.

"McDonald’s and our independent franchisees support paying our valued employees fair wages aligned with a competitive marketplace," McDonald's said.

Steve Caldeira, the CEO of the International Franchise Association, characterized the protests as a headline grab aimed at growing union membership "on the backs of hard-working small business owners and their employees," in a statement Wednesday.

Still, Bienvenida Pichardo, a 57-year-old McDonald’s worker here, said it’s not enough. Pichardo, who has been working at a Manhattan McDonald’s for 11 years, said in Spanish through a translator that she makes just $8.35 an hour. Thursday’s demonstration was the first time she had come out to protest, the mom of two said, though she has been watching the demonstrations on the news for months and waiting for an opportunity to get involved.

“It was time,” she said.

What CEOs Really Want When They Complain About 'Uncertainty'

Congress is back in session, and corporate America’s favorite excuse is back in action.

Uncertainty is once again hampering executive decision-making and holding back economic growth, Randall Stephenson, the chairman of AT&T and the Business Rountable, told the New York Times in an article ominously headlined “Uncertainty in Washington Poses Long List of Economic Perils.”

This is a common complaint from CEOs. It's a complaint that always gets far more credence than it deserves for two reasons: Reporters and policy makers take the complaints of CEOs themselves as evidence of actual economic harm, and some studies purport to show that uncertainty has in fact hurt the economy.

It turns out, however, that when CEOs complain about “uncertainty,” what they really mean is “more corporate tax cuts, please.” And all the evidence suggests that a common side effect of curing uncertainty -- government austerity -- is far more harmful than uncertainty itself.

Earlier this week the Business Roundtable said its index tracking the economic outlook of CEOs has dropped and now predicts a 2.5 percent economic growth rate next year, unchanged from 2014. In a press release, Stephenson said “the economy ended the year essentially where it started – performing below its potential."

And he offered this predictable prescription: "Congress and the Administration should act now on tax extenders and Trade Promotion Authority to encourage additional business investment.”

That’s an amazingly honest statement: Uncertainty is hurting the economy, therefore we need a fresh round of corporate tax breaks and trade negotiations.

Fascinatingly, more CEOs told the Business Roundtable they were planning on increasing hiring than last quarter. This suggests that, while certain tax-dependent decisions must wait for tax policy to be sorted out, the underlying revenue streams of the businesses represented by the Roundtable are in no way endangered by action, or a lack thereof, in Washington.

Research purporting to document uncertainty's negative effects isn't much more convincing than the worrying from the executive suite. A paper cited by the Times and written by the private research firm Macroeconomic Advisers for the Peterson Foundation -- a group founded by private equity billionaire Pete Peterson that is devoted to lowering the national debt by cutting benefits -- found that uncertainty plus reduced government spending cut 1 percent from economic growth from 2010 to 2013. Reduced spending accounted for 0.7 of that 1 percent. That’s not uncertainty at work, it’s just bad fiscal policy hurting the economy.

And what about that remaining 0.3 percent of annual growth that was supposedly lost because of uncertainty? Macroeconomic Advisers claims it came from lower stock prices and higher borrowing costs. In an email to The Huffington Post, Macroeconomic Advisers' Joel Prakken said "the link between capital costs and GDP is standard macro fare," and that policy uncertainty was "highly correlated with financial risk premiums."

The recovery has had many problems, but a depressed stock market and high borrowing costs are not among them. Sure, there have been some bumps along the way, but major stock indexes have more than doubled in the past five years, while borrowing costs for companies and consumers have stayed near record lows.

And it's quite a stretch to suggest that a few, short-term points shaved off the S&P 500 or a few basis points added to extremely low interest rates for some companies caused a 0.3 percent drop in gross domestic product. The relationship between economic growth and funding costs for corporate borrowers is a standard claim but a tenuous one.

Another paper, by the Kansas City Fed, claimed uncertainty cost the U.S. economy more than 8,000 jobs per month from 2010 to 2013. To quantify uncertainty, it used the VIX, an index that measures volatility in the stock market.

That’s an odd choice: Stock-market volatility does not represent the decisions of people in different sectors of the economy. The VIX is people and algorithms (lots of algorithms) talking to each other about stock prices. It can tell you something, but it doesn’t tell you much about the decisions of, say, a regional purchasing manager at a national grocery chain.

The Kansas City Fed also found that jobs were lost as a result of episodes, like the 2013 debt-ceiling debacle, that led to government spending cuts. But it didn't distinguish whether the job losses were caused by uncertainty or by the spending cuts that ended the uncertainty.

The idea that government spending cuts had a negative impact on the recovery is not new. Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke repeatedly pointed out that fiscal policy during much of the recovery was "counterproductive.”

The recovery has not been held back by a vague notion of uncertainty. On the contrary, it’s been the certainty with which bad policies have been passed that has hurt the recovery. When it comes to CEOs using uncertainty as a code for more corporate tax breaks, it’s best to take Matt Ygelsias’ advice and stop listening to the policy advice of successful businessmen just because they are successful businessmen.

Fast Food Protesters Take To The Streets On 2-Year Anniversary Of Campaign

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- The fast food protests that have swept the nation in recent years, including demonstrations in dozens of cities on Thursday, introduced Americans to thousands of people like Flavia Cabral.

Left: Protesters hold signs inside a Brooklyn Burger King, including some that reference the controversy over the recent deaths of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown. Right: A sign on the door of the eatery noting that it's open on Christmas Day.