[Jim Noble]

There’s lots of things that can be done to meet our constitutional obligation without staying with the current obsolete and bankrupt model. Just saying....a lumbering government bureaucracy whose goal is more so to protect its workers and let them live the good life rather than sustain its long term viability by changing and rationalizing costs

I basically agree.

I think government worker unions, per se, are unconstitutional - maybe anticonstitutional would be a better word (because their "contracts" appear to bind future legislatures, and therefore violate the Peoples' right to govern themselves).

However

I was a letter carrier before I was a physician. There's nothing wrong with making that fundamentally blue collar job have a reward structure that's commensurate with the level of intelligence and responsibility involved.

And, since I live in the woods and rely on the mail, I'd look more to downgrading the direct competition with FedEx and UPS (which relies on a false model of USPS being a self-supporting business) and put the emphasis on first class, recognizing that it will always lose money (it always has), but the "losses" are a service to the taxpayers, who deserve SOMETHING useful from FedGov.

[i_robot73]

Excuse the ? but what type of ‘intelligence’ is required to match up numbers and road signs vs. the ‘responsibility’ of putting it in box XYZ?

Now-a-days, are they not sorted by a machine? One would think the only thing left is to load ‘em up, drive ‘em along the route and ensure their ‘delivery’.

No rocket science requiring a 6-figure income and same retirement bennies.