Exxon to Offer Benefits to Same-Sex Couples in U.S.

The company says it will recognize "all legal marriages" when it determines eligibility for health care plans for the company's 77,000 employees and retirees in the U.S.

That means if a gay employee has been married in a state or country where gay marriage is legal, his or her spouse will be eligible for benefits with Exxon in the U.S. as of Oct. 1.

Exxon, which is facing a same-sex discrimination complaint in Illinois, said it was following the lead of the U.S. government. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which had allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted in other states. In recent months, federal agencies have begun to offer benefits to legally-married same sex couples.

"We haven't changed our eligibility criteria. It has always been to follow the federal definition and it will continue to follow the federal definition," said Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers in an interview.

Jeffers said the company offers benefits to same-sex couples in 30 countries, consistent with local laws.

But Exxon has been criticized for declining to offer same-sex benefits or explicitly ban discrimination against gay and transgender workers at a time when many other big companies, including rival oil companies, have done so.

In a ranking this year of corporate anti-discrimination policies to protect gay, lesbian and transgender workers by the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-rights group, Exxon ranked last.

The company is being is facing a complaint in Illinois for allegedly discriminating against a gay job applicant. Exxon says the complaint is without merit.

Tico Almeida, founder and president of Freedom to Work, a gay-rights group involved in the Illinois case, commended Exxon for changing its benefit policy, but criticized the company for "dragging its feet."

"It's a shame Exxon waited until after the Labor Department issued official guidance explaining that their old policy does not comply with American law," Almeida said.

Jonathan Fahey can be reached at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey .

Judge: VA can't deny benefits to lesbian Army vet

LOS ANGELES (AP) -A judge in Los Angeles ruled Thursday that a lesbian Army veteran and her spouse should be entitled to disability benefits given the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Appeal Made in Cozen Same-Sex Death Benefits Suit

The parents of a deceased Cozen O'Connor lawyer are appealing the district court's decision to direct the benefits of her profit-sharing plan to her wife, Jennifer Tobits.

Economic Scene: Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology

I traveled to Japan with a Tandy TRS-80 portable computer, which ran on AA batteries and had plastic cups to put over the phone receiver. It transmitted copy at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second. And I wrote about Mexico’s tequila crisis of 1994 without the benefit of a full set of Mexican financial statistics a few clicks away.

From my perspective, the evolution of the tools of journalism between then and now has been nothing less than breathtaking.

Articles are more thorough — informed by complementary data and analysis, enriched with links to things like interactive charts, videos and slide shows. They get to readers much more quickly. Most important, they reach many more of them.

For all its financial troubles, never has The New York Times been read by more people: 44 million unique viewers online in the United States every month. Yet if you were to rummage through American economic statistics you would find little evidence of journalism’s technological leaps. Measured by its contribution to gross domestic product, the most prominent indicator of the nation’s economic well-being, much of this new journalistic value enabled by information technology is not worth much.

This is true not only of journalism. The failure of I.T. to deliver measurable value has been a popular meme among economists for years. Back in 1987 Nobel laureate Robert Solow posed a now famous paradox: “We can see the computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

Last year, Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University proposed that the I.T. revolution has pretty must exhausted its promise. He asked, provocatively: “Is U.S. economic growth over?” And he forecast stagnating living standards for the vast majority of Americans for decades to come.

Government statistics lend support to his skepticism: Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being.

News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles.

What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

The Commerce Department is in the process of revising the way it measures G.D.P. to take better account of the contributions of investment in research and development and artistic creation. But even though the revisions to be announced this summer are expected to make the economy look bigger, they are not devised to capture the value that Americans get from digital technologies.

“G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”

G.D.P. misses what Americans gain from sharing information on Facebook or finding information on Google or Wikipedia. It misses how dating sites reduce the cost and increase the odds of finding a mate. It misses the time saved by drivers who use Google maps and the time gained by consumers from shopping online. Measured in money — what it contributes to G.D.P. — the recording industry is shrinking. Yet never before have Americans had access to so much music.

Unemployment Compensation: Early Retirement Acceptance Doesn't Preclude Benefits

An employee who accepts an early retirement package may collect unemployment benefits under the "voluntary layoff option" proviso in the state's Unemployment Compensation Law, the state Supreme Court has ruled, overruling a string of Pennsylvania cases along the way.

Economic Scene: Debating Real Value of Health Benefits in Poverty Calculations

In July, the Congressional Budget Office — the nonpartisan arbiter of the costs and consequences of government spending — decided that we had not been valuing these benefits enough. In a report on how income and taxes are distributed across the population, it decided, for the first time, to value health benefits provided by the government at every penny they cost.

The decision stoked a long-simmering debate about how much health care is really worth to poor families who may not have enough to eat. The reclassification of health benefits added $4,600 a year to households in the bottom fifth of income. It shrank the nation’s yawning income gap and muted the increase of inequality over the last three decades. And it changed the picture of what the government does for Americans.

The reasoning behind the budget office’s action seems to make lots of sense: the government spends almost $8,000 on the average Medicaid beneficiary and more than $12,000 for each person on Medicare. Why shouldn’t that count as income? Without it, the recipients could not afford an essential, lifesaving service. Moreover, the budget office considers Social Security benefits as income. And that’s the way it treats the health insurance provided by employers to their workers.

But not everyone thinks health care is worth that much. In particular, the Census Bureau does not include health care and other noncash benefits when computing the official poverty rate. Even its Supplemental Poverty Measure — which was created to capture noncash sources of income, as well as all the costs faced by the poor — sets the value of Medicare and Medicaid at zero.

That approach is not unreasonable, either. To paraphrase Timothy Smeeding, the director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: you can’t eat health care. Medicaid benefits are enough to lift many people out of poverty statistically even if they don’t have enough money to afford housing, utilities and food.

And the addition of those benefits could alter how we view our progress. From 2000 to 2010, government spending for each Medicare recipient rose by two-thirds after inflation. But those increases probably didn’t make seniors feel wealthier, especially since their out-of-pocket expenses for medical care rose, too.

For years, the Congressional Budget Office followed the general approach of the Census Bureau: health benefits were worth only the amount that a family otherwise would have spent on doctors and other medical services — that is, money that could be used on something else. So Medicare, Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits to a family that didn’t have enough money to satisfy necessities like food, shelter and utilities were valued at zero, because without the government benefits the family wouldn’t spend on medical care at all.

The change in approach alters the calculation of who is living in poverty. Including these health benefits at face value raises by 25 percent the income of households in the poorest fifth of the population, to $23,300 in 2009 from $18,900 under the previous calculation. This is more than three times the average income of the poorest fifth of households before federal taxes and government benefits kick in, which in 2009 was $7,600. The gains from the new calculations are enough to vault a family of two parents and two children over the Census Bureau’s official poverty line of $21,756 and to almost breach the supplemental measure’s threshold of $23,854.

Because two-thirds of Medicare funds and 83 percent of Medicaid funds are spent on the poorest 40 percent of the population, the shift also narrows the nation’s income gap. Under the budget office’s old method, the richest fifth of American households made more than nine times the incomes of the poorest fifth, after taxes and government benefits. Under the new method, the rich take home less than 7.5 times what the poor do.

The new definition of income removes many seniors from the poorest group of Americans, as they are big consumers of Medicare. And it pushes more working families to the bottom of the income scale.

Accounting for health care this way also changes the view of what government actually accomplishes. Social scientists have noted with some dismay that taxes and government transfer payments have become less effective over the last 30 years at narrowing the income gap in American society. But including health benefits changes the outcome significantly because health care is becoming a much bigger part of government spending.

Under the budget office’s old methods, taxes and government spending in 2007 narrowed the income gap by 17 percent, as measured by the Gini index, which ranges from 0 when everybody has the same income to 1 when one plutocrat hoards it all. Including all government health spending as income, the government reduced inequality by 21 percent.

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

Postal Service Defaults on a $5.6 Billion Benefits Payment

The agency said it expected net operating losses to be $15 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. That loss includes the two missed payments totaling $11.1 billion for the agency’s future retiree funds. This month, the Postal Service also faces a $1.5 billion workers’ compensation insurance payment to the Labor Department. It said on Monday that it would most likely make that payment, but that it would be left with a cash shortage of about $100 million.

Postal Service officials said they expected the shipping of holiday packages and election mailings to help offset some of the losses. Patrick R. Donahoe, the postmaster general, said there would be no disruptions in post office operations. Mail will continue to be delivered on time, and employees and vendors will continue to be paid, he said.

“Customers can be confident in the continued regular operations of the Postal Service,” Mr. Donahoe said.

The agency had warned Congress for months that it would not be able to make the payments into the fund for its future retiree health benefits. The first $5.5 billion payment was due last September, but lawmakers allowed the service to push back the payment until August while they worked on postal legislation. The second payment was due on Sept. 30.

The payments are required by a 2006 law and do not affect current retiree benefits.

Lawmakers left Washington last month without passing legislation that would have helped the Postal Service deal with its crippling debt and its operating losses.

The agency is seeking to end Saturday delivery, enter new lines of business like shipping beer and wine, close nearly half of its mail processing centers and reduce hours at local post offices. It is also seeking to stretch out the payments for its future retiree benefits and to receive a refund of $11 billion that it has overpaid into one of its pension funds.

The Senate passed a postal bill that would give the agency some of the changes it seeks, but the bill does not allow the agency to end Saturday delivery. The House has not passed its version of the legislation.

Although Mr. Donahoe said he expected Congress to take up the measure when it returns after the elections, passage remains uncertain. Lawmakers will have to devote much of their time during the lame-duck session to dealing with the “fiscal cliff” — the end-of-the-year deadline for the expiration of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts and for billions in across-the-board spending cuts.

For now, the agency said it was doing what it could to lower costs, like reducing staffing levels and closing mail processing facilities.

But Postal Service officials, postal unions and large mailers said the agency could do only so much on its own. If the service is to survive, Congress needs to pass postal reform legislation, they said.

Postal Service revenue continues to decline as mail volume drops. Since 2006, first-class mail volume has fallen by 26 percent as online bill payments, e-mail and other forms of electronic communication become more widespread.