Going Postal

You've probably seen a great deal of talk recently about the U.S. Postal Service money trouble and maybe going bankrupt in a few months.  It's important to clarify the situation and understand that, as a pure business, the Postal Service is not operating at a loss, but rather than it's a political manipulation.

For many years, Republicans in Congress have wanted to close the Postal Service down and privatize it -- for some bizarre reason known only to them.  As a result, they wrote into a bill that the U.S. Postal Service has to fully pre-fund a retirement pension plan for all 600,000 employees for the next 75 years in advance.  That's why they have this debt issue.  It's not because the public doesn't use the U.S. mail, and that's poorly run and a government boondoggle waste. 

All it takes to get the Postal Service out of its “debt” problem is for a new Democratic Congress to get elected and change the law so that the Postal Service doesn’t have to pre-fund the pension for all its 600,000 employees over the next three-quarters of a century.

So, the next time some conservative tells you how badly run the Postal Service is and that's the cause of all its problems and why it should go out of business -- now you know the response.