Postal cuts to slow delivery of first-class mail

[ElNono]

Postal cuts to slow delivery of first-class mail (http://news.yahoo.com/postal-cuts-slow-delivery-first-class-mail-141723847.html)

[Wild Cobra]

Postal cuts to slow delivery of first-class mail (http://news.yahoo.com/postal-cuts-slow-delivery-first-class-mail-141723847.html)
The article has it wrong from what an insider friend told me. The consolidations of mail processing facilities will only add one day to some, not all, of the mail arrivals.

[boutons_deux]

Repugs have been trying to kill the USPS for years, which it's really union busting of evil govt employees.

A Manufactured ‘Crisis’: Congress Can Let The Post Office Save Itself Without Mass Layoffs Or Service Reductions

"But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today:

By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion). This $19.5 billion deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion."

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/

[Wild Cobra]

And key to remember is that no other government agency prefunds retirement accounts.

[boutons_deux]

key to remember that many, most?, large corps badly underfund,and sometimes outright steal from and cheat on their employee pension funds.

[coyotes_geek]

Repugs have been trying to kill the USPS for years, which it's really union busting of evil govt employees.

Damn those repugs and how they tricked Al Gore into inventing the internet just so they could kill the postal workers union.

[Bender]

I thought it was common knowledge about the govt and post office and the retirement fund pre-funding requirement that is killing the PO... See post #2 by boutons.

but I dont see that part detailed in most MSM articles, such as the one in the OP

[coyotes_geek]

And key to remember is that no other government agency prefunds retirement accounts.

Stop letting the USPS piggyback their retirees on the federal retirement system. Problem solved.

[boutons_deux]

"Stop letting the USPS piggyback their retirees on the federal retirement system."

Stop letting Congress control USPS.

[coyotes_geek]

^^^ All for it.

[TeyshaBlue]

Ive always thought the USPS has underpriced their product from about day 1.
Seriously, a letter delivered to anywhere in the US, usually in a few days, for .50?

That's pretty cheap.

[boutons_deux]

first class mail, in fact the entire USPS, is subsidized by spammers.