Posted on 02/07/2013 4:27:36 AM PST by LD Jackson
Wrong. Nobody cares.
What a namby-pamby Government-loving article. Why did you post it?
There are another 9 million working people in businesses that depend on mail service working correctly. You may not be affected but they are. Since they are the ones paying the bills ~ through postage ~ it’s their business and none of yours.
The postal service has plenty of their own problems but the biggest were created by congress. Personally I would dump PAEA, allow the postal service to set stamp prices at will, and decide hours locally. I’m also fine with ending Saturday delivery.
I’m in a location that doesn’t exist in some of the package routing and tracking software so if I order something, it has to go to the post office or I don’t get it.
I don’t see how my post is a “Government-loving” article. I was merely pointing out that not all of the problems of the Postal Service are caused by the management. Congress has played a significant role in the decline of the USPS.
I wonder how people would feel if congress were to step in and tell FedEx “You can charge this much and must set this much aside for retirees”.
The USPS could set about reducing its disastrous inefficiencies. Instead it's bleating about having to pay for its own poorly-negotiated liabilities.
The usual FR union-hacks can't bear the idea of a Government agency not having its liabilities paid for by the tax-payers in perpetuity. I am so surprised.
You aren’t being honest and that really says there’s no point in even arguing the issue with you.
I am far from being a union hack. I can’t stand unions, for the most part. What I am disinclined to believe is smart is for the Postal Service to be forced to fund 75 years of retirement benefits for future employees, in advance. That’s total ignorance.
We can cut the Postal Service to the bone and it will not address this mandate from Congress. Again, that is total ignorance.
What cracks me up is the complaint that we’ll be forced to fund their retirement. What the hell do they think will happen if we were to close the postal service?
It all depends on whose ox is being gored.
I suspect that before August gets here Congress will stop them from ending Saturday mail too. The entire junk mail industry has built their process around filling your mailbox with junk on Saturdays.
When they tried to close some post offices one of the ones that made the list around here was in a heavily populated area. A neighborhood where many of the residents were Democrats and Government Union employees. As you can imagine the hue and cry was overwhelming. To the point I suspect that office was specifically targeted to generate just such an outpouring of “you can’t close our post office” public lobbying.
I can think of many other rarely used locations in sparsely populated areas that would have made much more sense to close.
If FedEx demanded and recieved a monopoly from the government for certain classes of delivery (like the USPS has for 1st class mail), then perhaps they would be under congress' thumb the same way the USPS is.
The USPS is at least a constitutional service, unlike much done by Fedgov today so I don't have as big an issue with it as I do most government agencies.
To establish post offices and post roads; (Art. 1 Sec. 8)
The 1st class mail monopoly is one that FedEx, UPS etc don’t really want anything to deal with. Personally I would let the private carriers take over everything right down to the local post office. (Have them deliver to the local offices and let the locals deal with it from there)
I was talking to the UPS driver a couple weeks ago at the post office and he pointed out that I can send a letter anywhere in the USA for 46 cents flat (with 20 cents per additional ounce). If I send the same letter through UPS its going to cost me at least $10 and possibly considerably more depending on “zones” and rates.
This may be a naive question, even a dumb one, but I’m truly curious. Instead of going for drop-in-the-bucket solutions, why is the Postmaster General not going in front of the cameras and talking about the main problem, which seems to be prefunding of benefits? Backroom deals, or something?
Door Delivery
Small rural and far suburban post offices
Periodicals class
Non profit organization postage rates
Rural delivery extension
City Delivery post office box service
What you have with all off these items are politically potent constituencies who are sufficiently influential to get Congress to PROHIBIT CHANGE ~ in order to keep a service beneficial only to them which had been established under the former Post Office department.
I"d add Zone 12 but it's not as important as it used to be.
The financial and resources balancing acts to maintain sufficient cross subsidization to keep these things going is literally mind-numbing. Here I have been retired for 8 years and BINGO I'm still able to argue the case on every single one of them ~ not quite mind-numbing, but haunting!
The USPS is usually able to keep its expenses within 2% of its income ~ month after bone tired month for years on end ~ and yet the 2006 Senate decided that they could make a show of reducing the deficit by taking $5.3 billion per year from USPS.
That hit them upside the head with an oil-soaked 2X4 ~ and it's not been the same since that time.
This is the prefunding for retiree medical insurance benefits 75 years from now!
That the Senate acted in total ignorance is pretty obvious, but when informed they made no effort to correct their problem. I believe a couple of their members thought a privatized USPS would arise out of the wreckage. Yet, even if you could privatize the mails that list of problem areas I provided above would still exist ~ and the cross subsidization would need to be continued in some manner.
The current postal management has proposed several different plans for eliminating the cross subsidization problems, in part. Nobody has ever proposed a comprehensive program for fixing them ~ except me ~ and I retired ~ and don't give a darned either way at the moment. The Republicans imagine it's a union problem ~ yet the cross-subsidization involves a good $35billion ~ you'd need to whack clerk/carrier salaries by more than 50% to get that kind of savings. The Democrats imagine it's a public service problem ~ yet they figure as long as the Postal Rate Commission can get away with stiffing the rate payers there's no sense stirring up the hen house.
like Daryl Issa there are some folks out there who think saying anything about USPS other than ‘sell it’ is pro-government. Nevermind that the Founders kinda sorta stuck the federales with the mails ~ it’s better to fix something than wake up some morning to find out the mails are no longer available.
The other problem is that there are lots of places in the US where the post office won't deliver 1st class mail, at any price, but UPS, Fedex (or even Deutsche Post) will deliver packages.
Seems to me that 2006 act should be addressed directly, but what do I know.
Thanks for your response.
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