Posted on 09/05/2011 3:39:39 AM PDT by tobyhill
The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances.
“Our situation is extremely serious,” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview. “If Congress doesn’t act, we will default.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Donahoe has been pushing a series of painful cost-cutting measures to erase the agency’s deficit, which will reach $9.2 billion this fiscal year. They include eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers — nearly one-fifth of the agency’s work force — despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions’ contracts.
The post office’s problems stem from one hard reality: it is being squeezed on both revenue and costs.
As any computer user knows, the Internet revolution has led to people and businesses sending far less conventional mail.
At the same time, decades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on the agency’s predicament on Tuesday. So far, feuding Democrats and Republicans in Congress, still smarting from the brawl over the federal debt ceiling, have failed to agree on any solutions.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Uh, do you understand what “rural” means? In my neck of the actual woods, these people may not get to town for days or in some cases weeks. Think medicine delivery here.
Many city addresses could be handled by having the customer simply pick up when it’s convenient, but how is it convenient to make a 40 or 50 mile round trip to town?
And why are we arguing the silly points and avoiding the white elephant? If we REALLY cut the post office loose from the government, they could show a profit. They are forbidden from being profitable. They are supposed to only break even, or lose.
“Outsourcing all male delivery services to businesses makes Americans vulnerable”
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All male delivery services are illegal. Must have equal rights for women you know.
Ditto here. UPS stops every day. Fed ex brings it in too. We used to get DHL.
No need to wait on line at all. Just do what people do now when they pick up their mail at the post office: Take your key over to your P.O. box, open your box, and get your mail out of it.
This attitude here on Free Republic is just plain weird. Here we argue for helping out the private industries and businesses, yet when it comes to them advertising, you want them to pay through the nose. The USPS is a great way to advertise right to a person's address. Why do you want to hate on small businesses?
In the meantime, equating opposition to carrier delivery to opposition to national defense makes you sound like a democrat trying to make a point.
Yeah, I did that in college for a while when I moved constantly... but it wasn’t worth the seventy bucks a year it cost me.
Still isn’t.
And if deliveries of medicine are a problem, then I'd suggest that maybe the recipients of that medication would be better off living somewhere else, too.
I'm not suggesting this is an ideal solution; I'm just pointing out that reducing the need for delivery personnel seems to be the most obvious way for the USPS to reduce labor costs.
What if the P.O. box cost you $50/year and the home delivery cost you $200/year?
“Look for the union label”
If a frog had wings,
Great, so now our post office with parking for 60 cars will have hundreds of people stopping in to check their mail before or after work. We'll need the cops out there to direct traffic.
Junk mail goes right in the trash
Sell it off and open up delivery of first class mail to private carriers. We would however need to figure some way the government could sell commerative stamps to collectors (probably the only profitable and fun division). The Federal government could also keep a small federally operated service for its own mail or just ‘sensitive’ mail.
If this is a warning signal of the lack of "turnovers" in the economy, then their downturn in volume is very ominous...
The Feds could always retain a much smaller service exclusively for government mail or even ‘sensitive’ government mail- IRS etc.
Bail it out only until 2013, then cease post office activity for non-government mail.
It’s not. UPS does that here in MA.
The US must have some kind of Post Office because of very old international treaties, that both we and the British empire fought for, taking both our efforts to pull them off.
That being said, US domestic mail service is a different matter. There is no reason for the congress to insist that bulk mailing be subsidized by the Post Office. The “franking privilege” is so ingrained in US law that we probably have to keep that, though.
However, first class mail should be open to competition.
The best way for the Post Office to then compete would then be by offering highly secure legal and government mail, much more than it does today. Everything from having a required recipient, as in, proof of ID or you don’t get the delivery, to process serving for courts, to notarization and “electronic proof” of delivery admissible in court.
They could even perform the function of insuring that absentee ballots are from legitimate persons and addresses.
This would also include the ability to ship very valuable information, that would normally be carried by a bonded courier, as well as armored car services.
Lots of possibilities here for the Post Office to make itself profitable by performing far more specialized services. Though in a much diminished size.
Here’s the OPM calculator and comparison site. The rates for BCBS at least have gotten closer, but I still pay $431 for the same plan a postal worker gets for $322. I didn’t look at all the other plans.
Here’s the OPM calculator and comparison site. The rates for BCBS at least have gotten closer, but I still pay $431 for the same plan a postal worker gets for $322. I didn’t look at all the other plans.
http://www.opm.gov/insure/health/search/plansearch.aspx
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