The Post Office is a Manufactured Crisis by Congress, and the Corporate Media is Lying about it! [View all]

[Fight2Win]

It is true that USPS is facing fiscal challenges — it lost nearly $20 billion over the last four years and is at risk of not being able to meet a $5.5 billion mandated payment to the Treasury at the end of this month (which has been put off six weeks thanks to the last continuing resolution in Congress).

But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/?mobile=nc

I would also add that we need to end the Homeland Security regulation (the entire department/unaudited slush fund) that requires all mail to be sent through a major city.

This is not providing safety, but it is causing postal workers to have to work extra, and driving up the costs in fuel as mail is shipped for large distances and back again for no apparent reason.