Posted on 11/02/2011 3:13:12 PM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Stressing that the United States Postal Service will run out of money to deliver mail by next summer, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a proposal to help rescue the postal service.
“We are not crying wolf here,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said today. “The postal service literally will not survive unless comprehensive, legislative and administrative reforms are undertaken.”
Along with Collins, Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., Scott Brown, R-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., revealed their plan, actually a melding of two plans, today at a news conference. It calls for a fundamental restructuring of the postal service, including cost-saving changes that will affect individual and business mailers and USPS employees.
“Too many people rely on the federal postal service for us to sit back and allow it to collapse,” Lieberman said.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
One minor step they could take is to raise the rates on junk mail.
Dealing with the union and with gross inefficiencies in some of the larger POs is more important, but also more difficult.
I was asked to take a part time postion and thought it would be cool - I can say without doubt the hardest day of work in my life was not as difficult as the easiest day sorting and delivering first class mail.
Finally one of the only roles assigned to the Federal government in our constitution is postal service and their roads.
Just as an aside, I live in a rural area and use a PO Box number for my mail. My wife ordered a package from a rural town in Kentucky. When we got the tracking information, the USPS had transferred the package to Fed Ex in Kentucky, and they delivered the package to my rural Post Office in Texas. Fed Ex must be cheaper than the USPS. Is Fed Ex union?
This is NOT a bipartisan group. The letters behind the names are merely a fiction to play games with the electorate.
Ben Franklin, What a guy.
The US needs a postal system
The Founding Fathers thought it essential.
The military is not assumed to be self supporting.
Rightly so.
Add to the military, now scores, if not hundreds of useless entities bleeding the US treasury.
Why should the postal branch be the only self supporting Constituionally mandated service?
THE POST OFFICE EXISTS TO DELIVER JUNK MAIL!
And the crap is heavily subsidized by your overpriced 1st class stamps.
No, UPS are the Republican-killing teamster thugs.
Unless you actually want to send or receive a physical object.
We all benefit from the post office, everyone. It’s specified in the Constitution. Who said the post office had to pay for itself as a government agency (and it is no matter the technicality)? No other government agency has to “pay” for itself. Take the money from the department of education to pay for the post office. At least we get something from USPS. All we get from DOE is negative returns over the decades, going from first place to last in the world.
If someone wants to live in East Overshoe, Nebraska, at the end of a long lane, that's his business. But I shouldn't have to subsidize his letter and package delivery.
let the USPO go bankrupt and then reorganize without the union.
let the USPO go bankrupt and then reorganize without the union.
Thanks for pointing that out. The mail doesn’t sprout wings and move on its own. there’s a lot of grunt work involved getting the job done under time pressures. My postal worker brother was given the task of breaking in a new female employee on her first night on the job. After a couple of hours he didn’t see her around. Turns out she quit the job. Apparently she too was under the faulty impression that postal work is easy work.
And I wasn’t implying that you personally were under the faulty impression. I was just thinking about all the critics and think-tank experts who have no idea of the USPS beyond some bad stories about sorry window clerks. :)
Not really cost effective for something like a personal letter or small package.
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