Damned unions. They’re running ads like crazy. Claiming that they’re being screwed by the feds - when in fact they’re only being forced to fund the absurd obligations they’ve made. Damned unions.
How much do the feds demand other unions fund their liabilities?
Whether or no, this represents the cost of the Postal Service we have, one of the cheapest and most efficient in the world. The real question is, with the Internet, how much longer will we need a postal service? There are other ways to assure communications that might well cost quite a bit less.
Unfortunately, in December 2008, G.W. Bush advanced $17.8B in taxpayer funds to GM and Chrysler, ahead of an imminent 12/31/2008 bankruptcy filing, because he felt it would be unfair to have Obama enter office with 2 of the Big 3 in bankruptcy on January 20th. Bush's decision meant that GM and Chrysler, and the Obama administration had months to engineer the taxpayer bailout of the two firms, to prepackage Chapter 11's which were inherently unfair to many of the stakeholders.
The USPS is remarkably similar. A large private corporation (USPS), operating under government charter, and with nine yards of restrictive legislation that prevents them from scaling back their cost structures (i.e., labor, branches) to reflect the reality of their declining volume.
This is going to cost the taxpayer a ton of money, and both candidates need to address this in the campaign, before the election.
The argument over prepayment of the retirement obligations is one made in the shadow of a too-big to fail premise that applied in the auto bailout. There is an assumption that we couldn't let the USPS file Chapter 11, but that is as false as the arguments made in the prelude to the auto bailout. I would suggest that we must force the USPS into Chapter 11, in order to get the benefit of breaking leases (to shrink the physical footprint) and labor contracts (to reduce total labor costs) so that it might become a solvent business at a smaller scale.