Congress- not email- destroyed the USPS

Salon.com ^ | Feb. 6, 2013 | John Tirney

[Ouchthatonehurt]

You know that feeling of pleasure you get when you see someone stand up to a bullying, incompetent boss? It’s viscerally satisfying, isn’t it?

That’s the way I felt this morning when I heard Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announce that the U.S. Postal Service intended to move forward with a plan to stop Saturday delivery of mail, effective sometime in August. In doing so, Donahue stuck his thumb in the eye of the U.S. Congress, the mail agency’s ultimate boss. Bravo, Mr. Donahue.

You may think I have incorrectly identified the incompetent party here. After all, it’s a deeply ingrained part of Americans’ worldview that our postal service is the epitome of inefficiency and bad management, the perfect example of a bungling, poorly run government bureaucracy. That view gets reinforced from all kinds of sources – jaded journalists, editorial cartoonists given more to clichés than to cleverness, free-market economists, and others.

[muawiyah]

I simply made the point that we now have just about as many as we had nearly half a century ago but process 7 times as much mail.

Yes, the workforce is down ~ i had something to do with that. put me in charge of USPS for 2 years ~ on a special consulting contract ~ they don't pay enough for me to show up otherwise ~ and i'd top off a 1000% productivity improvement while speeding up average origin to destination times.

[Vendome]

Seems a lot of my perceptions are from my childhood and 40 years outdated.

Found a good report that details their funded(self) is from revenues.

I’ll read this later. stepping into a movie.

[dinodino]

No, it seems like YOU missed a lot of things.

The USPS does borrow money from the taxpayers: http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/06/news/economy/postal-service-cuts/index.html

They also lost $16B last year. The last time you claimed that the USPS was solvent, I did the math for you and posted the loss in 2012, EXCLUDING pension payments. You may go look it up in that thread if you are still hazy on these points.

As a taxpayer, I am tired of subsidizing a bunch of lazy union USPS employees who enjoy an anticompetitive monopoly on First Class mail. Break up the USPS for scrap and sell it off, or failing that, terminate the taxpayer loan facilities and eliminate the monopoly and let’s see if the USPS can stand up on its own two feet or if it collapses under the weight of all of the fat union morons.