Yesterday I sent two first class letters across the great divide. It cost me under a dollar.
Last week I sent a letter with a check in it by Fed-Ex on a first class schedule. It cost me over twenty dollars. Who wants to cut the U.S. Post Office that costs us nothing and provides such service? The cold hard fact is that the Private Sector costs far more than the public sector. Even though the private sector is filled with petty brigands it is still important for the very same reasons as always. It is good at distribution and is flexibly agile, however it is not capable of giving full employment anytime soon and it certainly can't run on the rules that Congress, during the Bush administration, foisted off on to the U.S. Post Office. Still you have to give them credit for hubris. Just look at the private sector GOP waving guns and complaining about a Democratic mother of three working in the private sector saying that Madam Romney has never worked in her life. According to her husband she's labored but has never worked outside the home. "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 <http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/opinion/editorial/editorial-post-office-pa in-needs-solutions/article_9fe2a8d2-e634-11e0-bd1d-001cc4c03286.html> 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 <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407> 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 <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/nader230911.html> 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: REH
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
