Posted on 11/28/2012 4:42:06 PM PST by Hojczyk
The head of the financially struggling U.S. Postal Service said the agency must be allowed to ease the terms of prepayments into a retiree health-care fund and eliminate general mail delivery on Saturday.
Patrick Donahoe told "CBS This Morning" the agency isn't asking Congress for money.
He said, "I think most people don't realize, we're 100 percent self-sufficient. We pay our own way." But the postal chief notes the agency is losing $15.9 billion this year.
Donahoe says the post office needs to refinance retirement health fund payments to $1 billion a year instead of $5 billion.
He said the Postal Service would continue package delivery on Saturday and keep post offices open. In this scenario, he says the agency could be $8 billion in the black each year.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
How about one day a week...except for business... it is mostly junk
You love direct mail advertising or you hate America ~ no two ways about it!
How can you pay your own way when you're losing $15.9 billion?
Sheesh...
How about consistently being able to deliver a first-class letter to a destination 125 miles away in a week? I just spent a hour online transferring funds to a relative via the Web to replace a check I mailed (and the Postal Service has apparently lost) to said relative a week ago. No wonder the USPS is circling the porcelain bowl.
The fact is they are still bloated with too many sorters and others who should be let go. Congress paid for magazine sorting machines and they sit unused while union labor still does it.
Waste.
So end Saturday delivery, I don’t see a problem with that.
another way is to pledge assets in exchange for money ~ lots of ways
Remind me, who pays their own way?
That's gotta' be pre 1972
I don't care if they are Democrats or Republicans, both are responsible for coming medical disaster ~ did you realize that ObamaKKKare's top brass have already defunded studies in epidemiology ~ they'll have us all dying from hanta virus and ebola before it's over.
I think it was in the late 90’s or something
I think they should keep Saturday delivery and skip another day, maybe Wednesday. Two days’ worth of skipped mail will be too big and too heavy for the on foot door to door letter carriers to hold.
Postage rate increase...
Tape a dollar bill to the envelope.
Want to send a package?
Tape your charge card to the box..
The USPS has outlived its present day usefulness. Trains replaced the pony express, airplanes replaced trains and today email and online bill pay are knocking out what remains. Not to leave out all the waste and union pensions. Within a 10 mile radius of my home there are about 5 post offices and two privately owned UPS stores. I do prefer private enterprise but what the post office needs to do is to consolidate their locations and handling facilities and maybe get into some modern day technology. 98% of all mail I receive through the USPS is junk mail.
I meant to say compared to two privately owned UPS stores.
There was a national defense purchase in the 2000's where sniffers and such were installed to detect bombs or biological weapons ~ but they don't sort mail.
BTW, magazine volume is so small these days special sortation for them is never going to be in the cards. The big employment centers to hit are RURAL POST OFFICE POSTMISTRESSES AND THEIR RELIEF CLERKS.
We don't need those facilities and haven't needed them for the last century!
How about simply ending USPs’s monopoly, subsidies, and price controls?
Can we please at least stop the foot delivery of mail? How about individual or group streetside mailboxes?
Every time I see a mailman walking down the street sliding mail into slots and house boxes I think if only someone had a brain, they could break even....
What is your mail address, You can have all of my junk mail, I will send it to you.
They have a website where you can tell them of your concern and you will never receive any direct mail advertising again in your life EVEN IF YOU WANT IT!
>> How about individual or group streetside mailboxes?” <<
.
Evening Rape Access Kiosks?
>> “They have a website where you can tell them of your concern and you will never receive any direct mail advertising again in your life EVEN IF YOU WANT IT!” <<
.
Link?
every day I walk to the end of my driveway and get my mail. Not been raped once.
Some of my neighbors pull their car up to theirs and can retrieve their mail without even getting out.
If we can’t walk to the end of our driveway to get our mail, we have a much larger problem.....
>> “You love direct mail advertising or you hate America ~ no two ways about it!” <<
.
You forgot the Barf Alert!
http://www.directmail.com/directory/mail_preference/Default.aspx ~ and then, you too, can join the mindless millions in the thrall of communist overlords and apparatchiks ~ they don’t like capitalist endeavor either!!!!!
The end of your driveway is nowhere close to group boxes that sometimes are one per block.
Donahoe says the post office needs to refinance retirement health fund payments to $1 billion a year instead of $5 billion
I would agree. When the time comes to pay for the retirement health services, 1/5th of the services should be paid for by the fund with the rest picked up by the retiree.
What the $5 billion a year tap is for is to pay medical insurance plans for employees who may be employed 75 years in the future!
It has nothing whatsoever to do with currently employed postal workers or current retirement system needs.
Olympia Snowe came up with the idea as a way to trick the public into thinking the deficit had been reduced back in 2006.
Some people were tricked.
True. My point is that even with end of driveway boxes and mail delivery vehicles, the efficiency rate would be multiplied by what, 10 or 20 times over walking carriers?
I’m surprised they gave up horses.
There's not a postal employee on the planet who will ever benefit from a penny of these payments!
It's a total piece of budget trickery and BS.
Your point being, as I understand it, that there isn't a government body nor a corporation that is required to fund pension benefits in advance to the extent the USPS is.
Indeed, if advance funding of this nature was required of anybody else -- by law -- there wouldn't be any pension benefits offered.
Depends on the location and conditions.
The problem with door delivery is that it was grandfathered in by postal rules ~ not by Congress ~ when the USPS was set up.
It can be easily disposed of with a rule change requiring curbside or cluster box service. The change is worth something this side of $100,000,000 ~ simply getting rid of unneeded rural post offices is worth more than $10,000,000,000, or 100 times as much! It also affects many fewer people.
I'm so happy that Snowe woman left the Senate. She's being replaced by an idiot, but that's an improvement of sorts.
Fine, skip cluster boxes. I’d still take the efficiency of curbside. I fail to see the “hardship” in having to walk 40 feet to the end of the driveway.
I’m also in favor of eliminating unneeded rural post offices. My wife comes from a town of 218 people, less than 5 miles outside the city limits of Kansas City, MO. It has it’s own postmaster..... There is a major post office less than 10 miles in each direction.
USPS is funded by commercial and counter sales, not through tax revenue.
I started paying bills online after this election to do my part to reduce the federal workforce (and maybe force postal workers to face reality); I should have done it sooner, but the stamps I have now will last for years for the few bills I will still pay via check.
Too much government work is just wealth redistribution disguised as “work”.
Ditto on the junk mail.
If people ever actually find enough within them to resist the govt. the USPS is a ripe target for takedown. Just start sending things a nickel postage due. And save your junk mail and resend it to yourself, just drop it in a box.
I prefer to choose my own endeavor to patronize; not to have my mail box invated by crap that I have to pay to have hauled away.
You did realize you can simply not put out a box and no mail will be delivered to you.
Cut executive pay 50%.
In return for lost Saturday service, they should fire one out of 6 employees and cap pensions.
They should get rid of half of all employees associated with the physical handling of mail (and their managers and manager’s managers...).
Then, switch everyone to every-other-day delivery - some neighborhoods Monday/Wednesday/Friday and others Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. The only exceptions would be those that get enough mail that it’s easier to deliver to them daily rather than every-other-day.
Cuts current operating expenses, and substantially cuts the number of future retirees who need to be pre-funded now.
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