REPUBLICANS OUT TO DESTROY THE POST OFFICE Republicans do so many bad things but lets not forget the Post Office and Issacs drive to end it so he can gain millions of dollars. From the Article: What Is To Be Done? The post office does not have to disappear. Here are five steps toward reviving and strengthening this valuable public institution. 1. Declare an immediate 2-year moratorium on any further post office closings or reduction in hours. This will give the country time to catch its breath and implement steps 2 through 5. 2. Require that a genuine analysis of the costs to the community occurs before a closure or reduction in hours is implemented and the information be easily and transparently available to the communities targeted. 3. Create a genuine appeals process. Currently communities can appeal to the Postal Regulatory Commission, an agency within the USPS, but the process is cumbersome and only a very, very small percentage of appeals are successful. But the PRC cannot overturn a USPS recommendation but only send it back to the USPS for further review. 4. Approve the current USPS request for a 3-cent increase in the price of a first class stamp. This 5.7 percent increase would generate $2.3 billion, more than would likely be saved by reducing hours, closing post offices and mail processing centers combined. And the United States would still boast by far the lowest priced mail delivery of any developed country. When it comes to price increases we should compare the way the USPS monopoly of first class mail compares to the cable tv companies virtual monopoly of tv. Between 1995 and 2012 for example, cable prices rose by 176 percent while the price of a first class stamp rose by only 42 percent. If the current request is approved the price of a letter will still have risen by less than the rate of inflation while cable rates have increased by more than triple that rate. 5. Eliminate the 2006 Congressional requirement that USPS prefund 100 percent of retirement health benefits over 10 years at a cost of about $5.5 billion a year. No other public agency or private company does this. For more background on how this bizarre situation came about, see here. In brief, in 2003 the USPS discovered a $70 billion surplus in its pension fund. But under federal accounting, allowing the USPS to tap that surplus would increase the federal deficit. So Congress made the surplus disappear by requiring the USPS to prepay health benefits, an artificially imposed expense that has accounted for virtually the entire USPS deficit. The American people created the post office. The American people can still save the post office. But we need to do something right now. Time is running out.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 15:14:48 +0000
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