How Congress is killing the Post Office
With Saturday postal deliveries soon coming to an end, here is a year old blog explaining how the Congress is killing the postal service for many reasons (ideological, corporate bidding).
How Congress is killing the Post Office
By Felix Salmon JULY 20, 2012
The Post Office’s problems are the same today as they were back in September: the long-term secular decline of postal mail, on the one hand, combined with all manner of Congressionally-mandated restrictions which make a bad situation much, much worse. And now the inevitable has happened: we’re going to have a $5.5 billion default.
A default of that magnitude sounds scarier than it actually is. Congress requires the Post Office to make inordinately huge pension-plan payments, for reasons which nobody can really understand. But in the final analysis, USPS pensions are a government obligation, and it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference whether they come out of a well-funded pension plan, a badly-funded pension plan, or just out of US government revenues.
How Congress is killing the Post Office
By Felix Salmon JULY 20, 2012
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inShareThe Post Office’s problems are the same today as they were back in September: the long-term secular decline of postal mail, on the one hand, combined with all manner of Congressionally-mandated restrictions which make a bad situation much, much worse. And now the inevitable has happened: we’re going to have a $5.5 billion default.
A default of that magnitude sounds scarier than it actually is. Congress requires the Post Office to make inordinately huge pension-plan payments, for reasons which nobody can really understand. But in the final analysis, USPS pensions are a government obligation, and it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference whether they come out of a well-funded pension plan, a badly-funded pension plan, or just out of US government revenues.
What does make a lot of difference is the degree to which the Post Office is hamstrung by Congress. There’s still room for the Postal Service to reorient itself and become a successful 21st-century utility — but there’s no way that’s going to happen if it’s constantly on the back foot and if Congress prevents it from entering new businesses, possibly including banking.
To put it another way: the Post Office is broken, in large part thanks to unhelpful meddling by Congress. And it won’t get fixed unless and until Congress gets out of the way and stops forcing it into the corporate equivalent of ketosis, essentially consuming its own flesh in order to survive.
—-Continued
Frank says: