Posts
4645
Joined
8/15/2006
Location
90 MILES SOUTH-ISH, FL, USA
Edited Date/Time
1/27/2012 12:53am
Not according to my local post office.
All the postal workers at my local branch are swearing up and down that the whole ruckus about the Postal Service not making money is complete BS. They say that they are making a hefty profit and that the entire reason that this is being played by the politicians is that homeland security really, really wants to read our mail. By keeping our mail with the USPS, the government and specifically Homeland Security has absolutely zero chance of reading or opening our mail. But if it were privatized, they could use the Patriot Act to get into our mail.
Anyone else hear anything about this?
All the postal workers at my local branch are swearing up and down that the whole ruckus about the Postal Service not making money is complete BS. They say that they are making a hefty profit and that the entire reason that this is being played by the politicians is that homeland security really, really wants to read our mail. By keeping our mail with the USPS, the government and specifically Homeland Security has absolutely zero chance of reading or opening our mail. But if it were privatized, they could use the Patriot Act to get into our mail.
Anyone else hear anything about this?
I'm old fashion that way!
The Shop
DeCal Works Huge Plastic Inventory of UFO and Polisport kits.
Luxon 4-Post Bar Mounts
$189.95 - $239.95
I could get by with two or three days a week service. I NEED snail mail. I don't trust electronic banking. Let me write a check and send it through the mail. It's worked very well for me and no one has hacked into my check book and takin' funds.
Yes, I'm alright with paying property taxes which fund our schools because, as a citizen of the United States, a more educated populous benefits society as a whole.
I am not sure how the USPS benefits ME. The only things I get in the mail are advertisements which I end up paying for...
Should I have to pay for subsidies for the UPS and FedEx as well?
Why should I pay for social security, when I won't need it?
Why should I pay for medicare, when I don't use it?
Why should I pay for the public liberary, when I don't go there?
Why should I pay for a memorial at Ground Zero, when I haven't been there?
What's wrong with having the cost of postage reflect the actual cost of delivering post?
Pit Row
S
I think a larger part of the problem is that you've got janitors that sit around for 8 hours/day making 20/hour, full benefits, full pension. Then you've got all of retired employees pulling that pension....it gets expensive.
"We commenced operations on July 1, 1971, in accordance with the provisions of the Postal Reorganization Act (the Act). The equity that the U.S. government held in the former Post Office Department became our initial capital. We valued the assets of the former Post Office Department at original cost less accumulated depreciation. The initial transfer of assets, including property, equipment and cash, totaled $1.7 billion. Subsequent cash contributions and transfers of assets between 1972 and 1982 totaled approximately $1.3 billion, resulting in total government contributions of approximately $3 billion.'"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/alston/alston21.html
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/109xx/doc10975/84doc25c.pdf
But you'll also note that it's not the day-to-day operations that cripple the business and require subsidy from the taxpayer. I quote from the 1984 article, "Of particular note are the costs of health and pension benefits for USPS retiress. The USPS now covers only two-thirds of these personnel costs, and the federal government covers the balance in 'indirect subsidies.'"
The situation 37 years later is only worse. And whom do we have to thank for situations like this? Government employee labor unions might be a strong suspect. They already had gotten these benefits from the USPS before the USPS was forced to become self-sustaining. But over time, despite an increase in postage costs of 733% (an inflation rate of almost 20%) they still cannot afford the retired employee benefits package.
So what's the albatross around their neck? Not the mail delivery side of the equation, I would submit.
We are going to see this more and more as time goes by in our perma-recession. All the labor "benefits" were accepted by management on a cost-deferred basis. That came from the idea of the country having a never-ending expansion of its economy (a Ponzi scheme, if you will). But we are now in an era of economic contraction. The GDP only grows relative to increasing population, and per capita it's decreasing. But the labor benefits for retiress continues to expand at an exponential rate.
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