talk of privatizing the usps, yea/nay? Best Fix for Postal Service Is to Take It Private

There's nothing wrong with the USPS, except for the fact that Congress required them to fund retiree benefits for 7 decades in the future; if not for that insane requirement, they'd be turning a nice profit. Even more so if Congress would let them offer things like faxing and notarizing documents. I'd hate to see them privatized.

Because the majority of people are receiving packages more packages they buy on the internet than they are sending things elsewhere. Even then, shipping from an urban area to a rural area is probably cheaper than from a rural area to another rural area. Sure rural to urban is probably also cheaper than rural to rural, but I think you get the point... As such, you would expect a private company to be able to offer lower rates to urban/high package traffic areas. So if you wanted to keep the USPS service model, it would, on average, take money out of the pocket of urban dwellers and put it in the pockets of rural dwellers.

When was the last time nationalizing something made it work better?

Usually what happens is the government bureaucrats kill efficiency, things go over budget and behind schedule.

Ooh, look at that, I made a generalization too without providing any proof for my claim! That was fun.

Postal service to default on $11.1b bill
Payments meant for retiree benefit

WASHINGTON — The US Postal Service is bracing for a first-ever default on billions in payments that are due to the Treasury, adding to widening uncertainty about the mail agency’s solvency as fewer and fewer people mail first-class letters and Congress deadlocks on ways to stem the red ink.

With cash running perilously low, two legally required payments for future postal retirees’ health benefits — $5.5 billion due Wednesday and another $5.6 billion due in September — will be left unpaid, the mail agency said Monday. Postal officials said they also are studying whether they may need to delay other obligations. In the coming months, a $1.5 billion payment is due to the Labor Department for workers’ compensation, which for now it expects to make, as well as millions in interest payments to the Treasury.

today's news..

http://bostonglobe.com/business/2...story.html

as state over and over previously.. if this was a private company it would've been run directly into the ground a long time ago.. Will all the people defending the post office be donating $ to put them back into the green?

OK, the "prefunding 75 years into the future" argument is garbage. They're just being forced to fund their own retirements [75 years into the future] just like every private business has to do.

Can you provide an example?

One of these is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. It requires the Postal Service to do what’s called "prefund" 100 percent of the health benefits for its future retirees. The cost: About $5 billion a year until 2017.

This is how it works. Each year, the federal government estimates how much Postal Service employees earned in pension and health retirement benefits and calculates what the USPS needs to save to pay these bills in the future. By law, the USPS has to store that money in a trust fund.

The federal Office of Personnel Management, which oversees pensions for federal workers, acknowledged in a Feb. 28 study that among federal employers, the retiree health benefit funding rule is unique to the post office.

They also said it’s essential. The USPS could go out of business, sticking the federal government with a bill it cannot pay. This could force the entire federal retiree health program to go broke, the OPM report argued.

Now, let’s look at Bishop’s claim.

Federal employers:

Under the current retirement system, all federal employers, including the Postal Service, must prefund their pension benefits. And as we explained earlier, the USPS does have unique health benefit funding rules.

It’s therefore accurate that under the current retirement system, no federal employer aside from the Postal Service must prefund 100 percent of both its retiree health and pension benefits.

State and local governments:

No federal or state rules require state or local governments to fully fund pension or health benefits, said Keith Brainard, director of research for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.

None of the experts we interviewed had heard of cities, towns or counties with health prefunding requirements.

Private industry:

By federal law, private companies must fund their pensions fully, and catch up over time if they fall behind. They don’t have to prefund retiree health benefits.

This means there’s no reason to go postal over the claim by Bishop and others that "no other public or private business in America" except for the USPS must fund 100 percent of employee pension and retirement health costs in advance.

By and large, this statement fits the evidence.

We do take some issue with the claim’s broader point, which is that the retirement funding requirement unfairly singles out the post office. As we noted above, the office that manages federal retiree benefits argues the arrangement could keep the entire federal health benefit fund from going broke.

The USPS?



Is there anything bad in this world that isn't the gubermint's fault?

The postal roads and the post service are in the constitution. So there was never a private postal service. Nationalizing usually means a government takes over a private industry.

Read Article I, Section 8, Clause 7.

People that argue about things like this should probably get educated on them.

Note that this clause only allow the gov to establish a mail service.

Private mail services used to be somewhat common in the earlier history of the US until they became uncompetitive on price due to smaller scale to amortize cost over and their routes were instead incorporated by the USPS. It's usually something that more astute libertarians would brag about.