It's All Your Money: Taxpayers may be on hook for US Postal Service losses

The U.S. Postal Service is often the butt of jokes, but there's nothing funny about the agency's bottom line.

The USPS is losing up to $25 million dollars a day. Until now, taxpayers have not been on the hook for its mounting losses, but that could be about to change. A bill recently approved by the Senate would appropriate $34 billion in federal money.

"If the post office was a business, it would be in bankruptcy," said Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla. "It's insolvent."

Ironically, however, Congress shares much of the blame. For years, the Postal Service begged Washington for the freedom to cut its own budget by closing post offices and cutting employees. But Congress, under pressure from rural constituents and labor unions, prevented the cuts, and the service continued to bleed red ink.

In December, the USPS said it wanted to close more than half of its mail processing centers, eliminate 28,000 jobs, end overnight delivery of first-class mail, close 3,700 local post offices and end Saturday delivery.

Let me go further, there are millions of people who don't want the internet and don't access it but they order electronic books ~ to read them. In case you hadn't noticed print is dead.

There are millions of others who can't access the net (blind for example). They order lots of things by mail.

Then there are electronic books produced in languages rarely found in use in the US, and probably not accessible on the net even if you wanted to do it that way, and those folks who want those books order through the mail, and receive appropriate recordings through the mail.

Remember, your experience is not necessarily the universal experience ~ however retarded you believe that universal experience to be. It's a huge planet ~ even though literally everybody eats frozen chicken produced in the US, if they're lucky.

Mm, yes, I’m sure MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of people read electronic books without Internet connections. Do you have a citation for this?

I also notice that you refer to “recordings”—those are audiobooks, and are not e-books. You do not read an audiobook. I understand that the visually impaired use audiobooks recorded on SD cards—that’s not what we’re talking about here. If the USPS ceased to exist tomorrow, these people would still be able to get their audiobooks via other delivery methods.

Blind people have a hard time reading electronic books. If you are trying to equate audiobooks and e-books, you are being dishonest. For the record, my MIL is visually impaired and I am very familiar with the audiobooks on SD carts she orders for her player. Those are audio recordings, not e-books.

You can get both ~ by mail ~ I am referring to the CONTENT as 'the book', and in terms of it being transported by some physical media (disk drive, chip, whatever) but i understand there are people into the reader as being pre-eminent, and some of the readers don't have ports. A quick review of the literature will demonstrate to even the most incurious that there are still a plethora of devices and media in the category of "Ebook".

Without going through a great deal of discomfort trying to read one of the I-pads and I-pad like devices around the house (owned by my sons) I can watch a 22-24 inch screen and read anything.

I"m not blind yet but my visual limits are quite pronounced, and my reading these days is limited to my Mac! And as they make bigger and bigger screens I will get bigger and bigger Macs.

They've dumped everything on a 1T disk for me so as long as I have the read software on my Mac I can read it ~

Now about VOICE, there's software out there that turns any digital signal into sound ~ I have a couple of different versions on my Mac. I used them only a short time back when I was blind. Had trouble finding the keyboard though.

No doubt everything is not yet portable from platform to platform and system to system, but all that comes in due course. By the time i need my computer to talk at me it will do so with ease.

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