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US Postal Service: Over $47 Billion In Losses In The Past Decade And Counting
Curious what pure, unadulterated government efficiency in practice, if not in theory, looks like? Then the following chart of USPS operating profits, pardon, losses over the past decade should be sufficient. The punchline: having generated revenues of nearly $700 billion in the past 40 quarters, the USPS has been bleeding red ink more or less consistently since 2006, and has now generated just over $47 billion in operating losses over the past ten years.
It gets better.
From the WSJ: "The USPS said its total liabilities were $67.16 billion at the end of the period, compared with $23.16 billion in assets."
That means the net capital deficiency, or "cost", to keep the USPS alive, amounts to some $44 billion as of this moment (which includes $3.1 billion in contributions from the US government and a $47 billion deficit since the 1971 reorganization).
Continuing: "The Postal Service reached its $15 billion credit limit with the Treasury Department in 2012. Under law, the USPS must pay its own way. It doesn't receive an annual taxpayer subsidy, but is reimbursed by Congress for some services such as delivering mail to the blind and overseas voters. The agency is saddled with a congressional mandate that requires it to prefund more than $5.5 billion annually for health benefits for future retirees. The service said Monday that it won't be able to make its required $5.7 billion payment by Sept. 30."
In other words, more pension accruals that will never be paid out until, finally, the administration has no option but to make the payment on behalf of the postal service (thank you PBGC).
Finally, one may ask: why doesn't this bloated, anachronistic, money-losing zombie just go away and make way for the far more efficient and nimble private sector? After all, there are countless companies which could step in and do what the USPS does for a fraction of the cost?
Simple. The answer:
- 489,727 career employees.
- 137,037 non-career employees.
Or, as they are better known in D.C., voters.
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They should just raise the price of a postage stamp to $10, problem solved
Same thing up here in CAD.
Px of stamp went up from $0.65 to $1 in a single year.
I don't mind i never mail stuff. But just goes to show the problems with nationalized postal services.
CanadaPost also cutting ALL residential mail delivery - say hello to community mail boxes. It is what it is, cut the fact, and let's get on with it.
Aw c’mon..
Nothing matters anymore in a world of endless credit.
..the end is might come when stuff matters again.
Enough!
losses don't matter as long as we are able to scan your mails and sell your address to catalog companies
hugs,
ben franklin
Technically this is a GOOD thing. They can scan everything, but technically is illegal to open.
Shut down the last legally secure (lol) method of communication... This way all the banks can LEGALLY send you LIES and seize your house for unpaid mortgage, even if you have no mortgage with the bank! If they send this bullcrap through the USPS it is mail fraud.
The FED Govt's job is to protect our constitution, our borders and to deliver the mail. They have failed the least at delivering the mail. What is a 45B loss when the FED was printing 85B a month? What about all the money that "cannot be found" and was likely black budgeted to fund terrorists that are sometimes our friends and sometimes our enemies?
FAILURE BY DESIGN. LIKE 100% OF EVERYTHING THESE COCKSUCKERS TOUCH.
There is never ever ever ever enough currency to pay off all of the debts in a fractional reserve fiat system.
Fuckers.
WTF!
"They should just raise the price of a postage stamp to $10, problem solved"
Hey ... How about a $0.50 'Email stamp' instead? You pays your money for the USPS retirement fund. The USPS employees get to look at the idle machines and overgrown fields where they used to dump your mail after opening the checks. Last employee who carried a bag retires out in 10 years. It's all good..,
They want it to fail so the oligarchs can privatize it.
Closer look at the losses identifying "non-cash" charges reveals their plan.
Revision: rayduh4life below identifies the scheme nicely.
I'd just like to point out in the "Illuminati" card game (Steve Jackson Games, 1982), the "Post Office" was the only organization in the game that, if your secret illuminati group controlled it, gave you negative income (i.e. it cost you money every turn). So this is not new news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati_(game)
"Never confuse them with the facts".
2006 law forced the Postal Service to prefund retiree health care benefits for 75 years in a ten year period. So in other words, the postal service is actually prefunding retirement benefits for employess that haven't even been born yet.
Absent that requirement, the postal service has actually been profitable.
Intellectual slobs and right wing rhetoric whores are the bain of this country. YMMV.
They can't fund the retirement plan they are promising their employees. That is a problem, see Detroit.
Not exactly, they can and are funding the retirement plan under any normal actuarial limits. Nobody else in the world funds pensions for employees who haven't been hired yet or even born yet.
The purpose of this future funding is to add a vew billions on the black side of the federal budget, not to fund USPS pensions for future empolyees. It's more likely that the USPS gets wound down and the surplus is never paid out, just retained to lower the US govt debt.
Sheeple and MORONs -- The Losses are an "accrual" accounting FICTION!
do some fucking homework!
There is no other organization - Private or Public Corporation, Federal government, state, county, city - that prospectively accrue for Pensions in "ten" years with a 75 year Horizon for benefit payments
This should be taken down as pure Propaganda
exactly!
Use of an accounting convention that makes the liability comparable to other entities in the same arena would be fair? this is just a blatant attempt to crush USPS so "they" can privatize it. Total over statement of pension liabilities by $$$billions
You know how "they" are.
Simple, just do what it is authorized to do. Have post offices.
Fuck mail delivery. It is obsolete anyways. There is no mandate to deliver mail to individual houses.
You can still send and receive mail. They would just not employ a gazillion unemployable people in the process.
pods
How would an 80 year old in rural Oklahoma get their phone bill?
LMAO
My "Priority mail" from 500 miles away that took 12 days & a 2,200 mile odyssey
Then when I questioned about why my "Priority mail" did not arrive as promised was told that " Priority mail"
can take up to 18 days
someone must be related to the Clintoons & what the definition of is "is"
the USPS is truly fucked up & badly mismanaged
Just bad luck. Mistakes are made occasionally
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllll
i deal with alot of
mistakes
I try to avoid the USPS when ever I can
You are total bullshit!
You are total bullshit!
**removed**
Or close shop
Stamps, stamps for sale, only $100 each. Get yours stamps here !
Hey how about this idea?? IF the Federal Government can print money out of thin air, then the Post OFfice should be able to print as many forever stamps as they want and then pay their employees (and pension oblications) in stamps. Maybe they could even print a One Billion Dollar stamp and hand that to their creditors. That would solve the postal debt problem overnight and all the whiners in this column would have to shut the fuck up!!!
so, the true cost to send something is more like $2.50 instead of $.49? just shows any monkey can run the USPS. and why these people could never get a job in the real world/private sector.
Congressional Republicans forced USPS to begin overpaying employee obligations and apparently is a sizeable chunk (if not all) of this USPS deficit.
It's a GOP ploy where the Democrats are just too stupid to put up any resistance.
It is probably how most pensions should be funded. Instead of stopping this one and going back to straight up ponzi, why not make all the other pensions actually fund them or admit they are nothing but a ponzi?
At least we would have fun watching the ponzi implode?
pods
It's only "overpaying" to dimwits that think money grows on trees and the bill can always be paid later. To everyone who actually produces economic activity, it's how a normal pension works. The fact that the USPS thinks US government ZIRP bonds are an appropriate "investment strategy" for their pensions is unfortunate, perhaps if this was what the USPS and its unions were actually complaining about- I might have sympathy for them.
They are not legally allowed to put the pension funds into anything else... again, thank you gop
They've had eight years to rationalize their business model, and all they have to show for it is the red ink of DeNile. The issue is Red/Black not Red/Blue.
Prior to the bipartisan, Democrat-cosponsored Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, USPS operated under a pay-as-you-go model for retiree health care funding. The Act requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its benefit obligations.
Bernie Sanders was a co-sponsor. What does that tell you?
Original bill passed the House 410 to 20. Passed the Senate on a voice vote, with an amendment by Unanimous Consent.
Here's the text of the final bill.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407/text
USPS was granted considerable regulatory flexibility regarding prices and services offered, and at the same time required to prepay retiree costs in accord with the GAAP model required of private business, instead of the tomorrow will never come model used by government.
One can argue whether the bill could have been better crafted. But the ideas that the USPS needed more price and service flexibility to respond to fast-changing technology, and also needed to make sure its promises to its retirees could be kept without a bailout, are tough to argue against.
Unless you're an Us vs. Them, Red Team/Blue Team blame game sap.
They don't have "regulatory flexibility." The postal service has proposed not delivering mail on Saturdays to cut operating costs and Congress said, "uhh, no."
Wrong 101 - nobody can 'manage' the USPS. Couple years ago the USPS managers came up with two ideas to save about 4-5 billion a year: eliminate Saturday mail delivery and consolidate/merge a number of (mostly rural) small post offices. Both ideas got shot down by our disfunctional congress, and not because the USPS employees bitched - it was the constituents/voters (again mostly rural) that bitched, a lot. I live in a rural area with 'twin cities' two miles apart - both have post offices. Dumb. Ditto rural mail delivery, especially on Saturday - dumb. The USPS managers know it, probably the congresspeople know it, but trying to do reasonable things in today's enironment ain't gonna happen.
Some of the USPS managers have left and found jobs in the real world.
Shot down on purpose. the oligarch's want USPS privatized. Congress was only doing as instructed.
There is an axiom of government labor.
"Work will grow to fill the resources dedicated to it."
And there is another axiom that applies to government work:
"The squeaky wheel gets the grease."
Once you understand these axioms it becomes perfectly clear why government consistently achieves the results it does across all nations, continents, and centuries.
Government does not have a profit motive = no motive or means to conserve resources.
Government rewards failure rather than success.
For those who abhor the 'cruel' darwinism of the world where these statements apply I can say only this:
It is the world of life. You know the alternative.
For all it's inefficiencies, the Post Office at least returns something, and is of use, to the low end common citizen. $44B? How much was pissed away on Iraq and of what use was it to J6P? Yeah, fuck, continue to shower the wealthy with trillions, but fuck the low end shit bag who lives out in the sticks and uses the post office to survive.
Don't forget the deliberate pre-funding of 75 years of pensions. ;-)
Righteo. At least the post office does something productive. Before we crush the mailman and scatter him to the wind how about we start with the CIA, NSA, Secret Service and homeland security.
I say hate it all, laugh at it all, and crush it all. I'm not into picking winners and losers. ;)
Well that simplifies things. I'll take care not to stand too close.
Compare this to the total spent on EBT's, you know..food? and then compare that to what we have spent on foo stamps over the last 30 years. Take that number over 30 years and do the same for what has been spent on defense over the same 30 year period. Paultry. Tyler, gotta a chart of those numbers of EBT/Defense since 1980? I'd love to see it's ratio!
Thank you for saying that.
I agree. I would add that delivering mail is one thing I would rather not have the private sector doing. The value returned to the taxpayer for the money spent on the so-called inefficent Post Office is simply the freedom from having the mail become yet another tentacle of the corporate banking cartel. Do you really want Pepsico delivering your letters, or to pay for their delivery with Wal-Mart loyalty stamps? Just imagine the junk mail, the data mining, the fines and penalties. I'll stick with the boring and expensive Post Office.
You seem to think that the government is not already the benefactor and protector of the corporate banking cartel.
That's funny.
Brother, you gotta be as frustrated as I am.
self-delete double post
You don't want the private sector delivering mail? Lol how about the millions of emails and bill payments made every day by the private sector. Using your logic everybody also deserves government run email and electronic payments. You are tuely stupid and do not deserve the vital organs God gave you.
Come and get them.
get rid off fiensteins husband selling postal properties to his friends for money
They don't go away because the government needs a way for citizens to communicate with the IRS and Social Security Administration. They shouldn't have to fund the next century of pension funds which was just the Republicans way of saying FU. The USPS is the only semi-functional entity of the government. They should also let them expand into banking services (e.g., check cashing and short term loans).
i'm sorry, but i can't buy into this "government can't run anything so why let them run anything" if we are going to use post office as example.
the government --- aka wholly owned corporate subsidiary Congress --- has stymied every single innovation that the USPS would like to implement that would make them in any way competitive......
AND saddled them with a completely untenable pension scheme....
all to protect THEIR corporate sponsors....
so please, I understand the anti-government meme, and sympathize with much, but such an outright nuking of a government entity by the corporate Congress? Come on guys.
You answered the question for us. The government stymies the PO? Well if the government runs it then this is just an example of the government screwing up another enterprise. They just used an extra layer of authority to do it.
sorry don't buy it. we don't have a government in place any more, merely functionaries of a corporate state, and the corporate state wants the Post Office destroyed.
it is too sweet a profit possibility to allow the peasants an efficient way to communicate. Just too sweet.....
so its been an entirely intentional destruction.
What the hell, it's only another month of printing.
Janet
America's oldest annd BEST jobs program since ....Ben Franklin....but they quit doing 'storm nor sleet' years ago.
In NV they are doing Sunday delivery for Amazon. It is a test program as I understand but at least they are exploring new ways to lose money.
Being nothing more than a criminal syndicate of thieves and murderers, government always accomplishes the opposite of the stated goal. Always.
Still waiting on the explanation of how the USPS can out perform an electron...
"Still waiting on the explanation of how the USPS can out perform an electron..."
Here's one idea:
Your access to the internet is easily controlled, monitored, restricted, or eliminated altogether as biometric and similar who-are-you-really technologies are deployed more ubiquitously.
Much harder to do that with a piece of paper through the USPS. For all its shortcomings, we will soon realize the value of a delivery service that was pretty reliable and easily anonymous, and many will wish for its return.
The red ink is largely Congress's doing. Very few profitable businesses could account for future obligations the way Congress requires the USPS to do.
Every since piece of mail in the US is photographed and OCR is used for routing. Mail to any destination can be turned off at will. At the moment senders can sometimes be anonymous, recipients definitely are not, and this is dubious at best, as they've caught senders of anonymous letters in the recent past looking at recorded video of mailboxes.
Losses and debt are the new profits!
Yeah the USPS stinks.............why can't they make tons of money delivering lots of crap to people's houses like Amazon does?
I miss paper letters. You can't send pubic hair through email.Ah the goodole days.
"pubic hair through email"
That's a trillion dollar idea if you can get it to work.
This is a new low for Zerohedge. The Postal Service has been "losing money" since the day Bush signed the bill into law that makes the USPS pre-fund 100% of the pensions of FUTURE employees. The "losses" on the postal service income statement are on paper only
http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/courier_times_news/opinion/guest/p...
http://www.thenation.com/blog/166103/post-office-not-broke#
You can find a plethora of links on the same topic with a simple internet search. For shame, Tyler. For shame.
it was part of the plan to demonize the usps to pressure public sentiment to disband it so the private package delivery services would have more pricing flexibility upward.
You are an idiot. STFU
Paper only? lol
Because GAAP compliance requiring accounting for future obligations in present operations is a bad thing?
I trust that you do not run your own finances that way.
It would be like applying for a mortgage and having to list all the expenses you are going to incur after you retire as "debt". Please do your own research on this topic and educate yourself.
Yep, the big ZH conspiracy to make the government look inefficient. We need bigger government and more unions and everything would be great like before we had big government and unions! Oh wait...
More like the ZH conspiracy to pander to his audience and get more page views so he can sell advertising on his site and make a living.
47 billion down the tube doesn't stop USPS from soliciting large amounts of ammo?
Thanks to "mark to fantasy" accounting, "losses" are now "earnings".
I bought 10,000 perpetual stamps back in '10 ($4400)
1) I'll never buy another stamp
2) Fine inflation linked investment.
What happens to your stamps' value if USPS goes belly up?
I think I'd have bigger things to worry about.......
A benevolent force like a gubbamin can/will redefine perpetuity to mean 'till the end of next year.' :-)
That's more stamps than I'd use in 5,000 lifetimes.
I use email $0
usps was never meant to be profitable. that is why it was a .gov entity. the rag on usps is that it is competition for private package services.
They should have invested in stamps...they never go below face value.
The losses don't matter - the PO can borrow Billions at next to zero. The PO borrows at a rate less than the Fed pays the banks for reserves. No Ponzi here - nothing to worry about....
The solution is to hand the operation over to the unions, hire another 500,000 workers, double their pay and give them 6 months of vacation per year
LMFAO!!!!
Barry's gong shows get better everyday. Nice job with the USPS Barry - perhaps they can sponsor another drug addict cyclist for the next tour da frunce - that may work too.
The USPS is now only delivering money losing small packages and letters while FEDEX and UPS get the lucrative larger, higher margin stuff.
And prime located USPS offices that used to be the life blood of mail communications are now being sold at pennies on the dollar to folks like Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband who then flips them to some bigger investors for massie profit.
All the Nation's Silverware is being auctioned off to the very wealthiest of predatory interests in the name of PRIVATIZATION.
Think about that when you drive home on the Privately owned Toll-Road that your tax money built.
Corporate America is screwing you in so many ways that they even have to make holes in your public roads as they drive their freight-tax free over it.
E-470, a toll road that bypasses I-25 through the Denver area, charges around 36 cents a mile. Plus, they get you at the offramp, too. It is one of the highest tolls in the US. I'm sure, eventually, all Interstate Highways will be tolled. Just think of the revenue... So many more government schlubs can be employed...
Toll Roads are owned by PRIVATE companies that hire their own staff at minimum wage while gouging you on your commute.
Are there ANY government-run toll roads? I don't think so. Even when you pay a fee to cross a tax-payer built bridge in this country it is a private company that collects that money.
We are living today in the nightmare of Corporate Lobbying and the capture of our Republic by big money.
You and the other POS communists on this string are completely full of shit. Check out Pennsylvania and their government owned toll road which charges enough to cover the roads subject to the tolls but ALSO fills the coffers of the government so they can all pay themselves at least double what they would make in the private sector, Dumbass.
Ah , so you like giving your money to those sovereign wealth funds? Hey, what's the big deal with handing your money over to foreign oligarchs?
What a tool!
Good luck getting to DIA from anywhere north of Denver without it.
There must be a cheaper way to buy votes.
Yellen has your back USA Post Office. 47 billion in 2014 dollars will be pennies in 2020. Now for the retirees, Yellen hates you insignicant meaningless citizens of the greatest country in the world. Ha, Ha
Psha! I have $100 Trillion in my pocket..never even circulated! That's a paultry sum to lose. What's the big deal man?
That's nothing!! I have over $1 Quadrillion (made up of $100 Trilion bills) in an envelope in my desk drawer. If I was in Zimbabwe now, I could be King!!
5.5 billion/yr because of the burdensome congressional pre-fund requirement (a backdoor fascist bailout out of fed ex, ups, etc) x 10 years = 55 billion vs the 47 bln operating loss.
Negative profits. Sounds better huh.
This article is stupid. It's another in a series of semi-regular cheap smears against the post office that appear on ZH.
No, the punchline is that in 2006, Congress mandated that the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health benefits, something required of no other agency or company, and also required that pre-funding cover the next 75 years, all paid within a decade.
One of the Tylers sure has a bug up his ass about it. I wonder if he's the same one that comes in on the weekends and posts crap from The Diplomat.
August 2012
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/insolvent-us-postal-service-loses-whopping...
November 2012
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-15/us-postal-service-burning-throu...
January 2013
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-28/latest-postage-stamp-price-hike...
February 2013
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-06/broke-us-postal-service-cuts-sa...
October 2013
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-06/americas-laziest-postman-or-wha...
February 2014
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-10/youve-got-no-mail
Rocking! Truth to POWER!
I LOVE YOU STOOGE! I want you to have my babies!
Postal "Service"? It's been years since I've been in a Post Office and received anything close to "service". Usually it is a grudging, snarly "doing you a big favor" dose of attitude. But then I guess since the IRS is allowed to call itself a "Service" without being taken to court for deceptive practices, the USPS can go on calling itself a "Service". I suppose also that the fact that this "Service" has cost us all $47 Billion more than it should have for years doesn't stand in the way of their self-congratulatory title either.
Worthless parasites.
'Service'=Orwellian double speak.
So, at least five USPS employees read ZH.
They would never raise the prices. It seems USPS solely exists to offer subsidy to Mail-order/Internet companies to allow them to mail goods at subsidized rates. Imagine what will happen the shipping business if you book order on Amazon goes from $3.99 to $15?
I would pay USPS a reasonable monthly fee to NOT put all the trash in my mailbox. It's getting hard to find the mail for the flyers.
Your issue is NOT with the USPS. It is with corporate America.
Tenshin, it would be a simple thing for Congress to stop those polluting mailers that clog your mailbox.
But there is a highly organized lobby that now owns every decision our congress makes.
We no longer have a Republic that works for the people. We lost our democracy. That is the bottom line.
Watch yer back, civilian!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKlzQo3Wqo
My friend worked at a post office as a small manager in the spam delivery department.
His salary was $60,000 and he has no higher education.
He quit for a stupid reason (long honeymoon) and now works for $10/hour.
Bonuses They get bonuses up at the top for losing money. How can I get some of that action?
Is the bonus bigger if you lose more? I can lose more than anyone if you give me that kind of incentive.
The Uk sold there postal service to the private sector and years later the value of the postal service was something like double it was sold for. Governments can't run shit, government was always deemed a job for life so no one gave a fuck. The larger the government the bigger drag on the economy.
Congress traditionally has included a provision in legislation to fund the federal government each year that has prevented the Postal Service from reducing delivery service. The Postal Service had asked Congress not to include the provision but despite the request current legislation maintains the provision.
So again, as America sits mired in debt with a growing deficit, our government has failed to take a simple commonsense step to correct the problem. This also means you Mr. President who is off on vacation in Martha's Vineyard has again failed to step up to the plate and provide leadership. More on this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/04/post-office-fails-again-how-pathe...
U.S.P.S. it almost always gets there broken...
Try not to laugh too hard at the video.
Also known as a profit in the new-fangled accounting.
The US Post office was established as a SERVICE to all of the remote and rural areas of the US, so they might receive books and packages at a price they could afford.
It also provides a low-cost service for many BUSINESSES that rely on the USPS to deliver correspondence, bills, payments, and merchandise.
Yes, the post office could be "profitable" if it abandoned delivery to remote areas and quintupled postal rates.
"Profitable" (to whom?)
Is there any other profit-making government service?
War-making is quite "profitable", but those profits are already privatized.
The ObamaCare was established as a SERVICE to all of the remote and rural areas of the US, so they might receive health care at a price they could afford.
How's that working out for everyone?...
Why has the money losing USPS made a special deal with Amazon to do Sunday deliveries in two cities? This is wrong on several counts. The first and biggest reason is that the USPS is an extension of the US Government and a money losing one at that.
Another problem is this hurts all the smaller mom and pop businesses and brick and mortar stores in a community. This makes government an alliance to a company built on exploiting those who provide jobs to us on the most basic level. Before government decides to embark on such a mission a debate should occur as to the values we hold dear. More on this subject in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/11/usps-and-amazon-another-unholy-al...
That is a whack of 'triple-time' overtime!
At least they're trying to balance the pensio expenses ahead of time. Wait until SS & Medicare try the same thing. Trying to fund the "unfunded liabilties" will do the same thing to the whole country.
I used to be perfectly happy mailing checks to pay my bills. Then the Post Office, with it's push for uneducated affirmative action hires, started getting incredibly slow and rude to its customers (yes, myself included). So I did everything that I could, and do everything that I can, to no longer have to be abused by my local Post Office employees. Having to wait 30 minutes to mail a large letter is way to much. Having to wait then have the wealthy (pension) employee behind the counter be nasty is over the top.
.
If all muni organizations funded their pensions at 100% they would be equally insolvent
If you were forced to fund every expenditure (every single one!) you will incur from this very moment until the day you die, and have those funds available at this very moment, you would be bankrupt too.
The local post office in N Seattle is a disgrace. The quality of service is horrible, the line is always 7-8 deep and you seldom get a smile from the folks behind the counter. I have seen counter people leave their station (for a break I presume)while the line is long.
No wonder they are losing so much $$, they are incompetent.
sschu
According to the useful idiots above us, this story of yours can't be true. All these postal employees are making six digit salaries with weeks of vacation time. These folks you speak of should be exceedingly happy with such lavish pay packages. The kind of pay packages afforded to those private titans many have a hard on for.
I know peeps in the usps. Here are the facts
City carriers make 28.00 an hour and get at least a min. of 50 cents an hour raise each year. Contract 1%ish and 2 cola's.
5 weeks paid vacation, 2hrs wk sick time or 104 hrs a year.
retirement is 1400.00 plus suplement until 62 of 70% SS or 1,000.00 dollars. retire with 30yrs after 56yo suppliment from 56 to 62.
5% match up to 5% payroll Thrift savings plan.
ALL the managers are black, Hate white folks and the blacks can do ANYTHING they please with no problems. All white carriers are treated as slaves. Routs are counted to the second, Management hates You and tries throughout your whole time there to fire You! All black carriers go to management cuz they will eventually end up wiff a bad back or somfin else nobody can proove.
There is nobody watching the store, the managers go home 3 hours early and the carriers pretty much rite their own paychex with time and a half after 8 and double time after 10 hrs. So when You see the mailman delivering mail at dinnertime to your house he is making 56.00 an hour to do so. Not uncommon for a carrier to pull down 85-90K a year. Not bad for a job that took all of 3 hours to learn with no formal education or skills required. This is what the fed thinks unskilled workers are worth on their payroll.
duplicate
I once knew of a mail handler who made $100K/year, and that was before the loses set in.
If we give this kind of money to a hostile, foreign power we can certainly fund the PO:
As of June 2003 Israel has cost the US taxpayers over $3 Trillion. Probably double that by now.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/june2003/0306020.html
Zero starts for this piece of junk claptrap. Look at every other private carrier, UPS, Fed Ex, etc. Every ONE of them passed on double digit price increases for years since 2007, and the USPS has to go to an act of congress for a few pennies increase in the price of a stamp. On top of that, the idiots in congress passed a law forcing the USPS to pre-fund all of the retirements. In addition to that stupidity, congress forced through passing the Forever stamp. that's right, stupid people, who want to destroy the USPS decided that in the face of the worst inflation in US history, they would force the USPS to generate a stamp that would be good forever, no matter how much prices everywhere else in the US economy went up. No, sorry, Tylers: some damn crooks in Congress are working their very hardest to destroy the USPS.
redd--I agree. It would cost 8.00 to send a letter by UPS.
We have gone from pony express to the internet.
This is not going to change. EVER.
I went from buying a book of stamps a month to a book of stamps EVERY TWO YEARS.
The only thing I get in the mail is junk mailings for coupons selling carpet cleaning, roofing, adult education, politics & shitty restaurants.
Mailmen are going the way of the Dodo bird.
Technology can be a bitch. But it must be recognized.
The post office is the best way to ship items. Since you are so great on the internet, maybe you can tell me how to ship an item over the internet.
Maybe the post office should switch to food stamps, works for everyone else.
The Postmaster General was asked to come up with a plan to make the post office solvent. So he went to work on it. He used what means he had at his disposal to study all the options, and I'm sure some consultants got their billing hours in. At the end of several months, he proposed his plan to make the post office operate without a loss, and to get it back on solid financial footing. This included closing the post office on Saturdays. Congress response? Not acceptable. How's that song go? "Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you, when your coming apart..."
This article only tells 1/2 of the story and therefore is worthless for accurate information. The USPS was running a profitable enterprise up until 2005 when CONgress in their infinite wisdom forced the post office to fund a pension plan with outrageous amounts of funds on a yearly basis. This was not the decision of the USPS and was basically forced on them. The end result is obvious in the chart accompanying the article. They went from being in the black on a yearly basis to running outrageous amounts of red ink. All for pension liabilities that will likely not even being paid to many employees that work there. It almost appears that CONgress was on a plan to kill the Post Office service as they can't get the campaign contributions from them that they could from their good buddies at FedEx and UPS - same old bullshit with a different corporate base this time. This kind of 1/2 the story BS is something that you normally see on CNN or Faux Neus and that's where it belongs.
P.S. - You want to see all your "mail" searched without a warrant? That's exactly what will happen if we lose the USPS and have everything delivered by a true private enterprise like FedEx or UPS. That's something that is conveniently left out of the conversation when it comes to shutting down the US Postal Service - where they have to have a warrant to open your mail.
Here's the other 1/2 of the story that the WSJ obviously didn't think was important enough to report (entire article can be found here - http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-pos...):
Both the news media and a number of politicians have claimed recently that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is in “crisis,” and that it is necessary to lay off thousands of workers or reduce service in order to make the post office fiscally stable. And the Post Office itself has proposed laying off as many as 120,000 employees and withdrawing from federal health care plans in order to navigate upcoming fiscal crunches.
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.”
As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today:
In order to remedy this problem, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) has introduced bipartisan legislation (which has 193 co-sponsors) that would allow the USPS to spend more of its own money to pay down its deficits, including $6.9 billion in pension overpayments or other overpayments that may total as much as $25 billion to $50 billion. These are Post Office funds, not taxpayer dollars.
Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has been pushing for legislation that would lead to widespread layoffs and break the back of the postal workers’ unions to defuse the “crisis” that Congress created. Yesterday, thousands postal workers and the Americans who value their contributions to our society held hundreds of rallies at congressional offices across the country to support Lynch’s bill and to protest against Issa’s.
forced the post office to fund a pension plan with outrageous amounts of funds on a yearly basis
Yeah it's really ugly USPS was singled out to fund their pension plan on realistic assumptions while everyone else get's away with bogus projections (cough CalPers).
Everyone should have the right to act as bad as their neighbors! /s
Meh. 47 Billion loss on 700 Billion in revenue? Just raise the postage 7% and get by with 50,000 less staff and mandate that anyone who requires more that 15 miles from the nearest post office has to come to the post office to get their own mail or deliver it once per week. Not that hard and not worth whining about.