This article cross-posted from The Nation
The United States Postal Service is not broke.
It does not need to be downsized. Post offices do not need to be
closed. Sorting centers do not need to be shuttered. Saturday service
does not need to be scrapped. And hundreds of thousands of jobs in rural
regions and urban neighborhoods do not need to be cut in a time of
economic instability.
Yet, this week, the US Senate is debating about whether to advance a scheme that would begin a process of downsizing that -- while not so immediately draconian as the plan advanced by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrel Issa (R-CA) -- accepts
the notion that the postal service's future is one of closures and
cuts. Ultimately, that downsizing points the postal in a direction where
privatization could be inevitable.
But that does not have to be the case.
National Association of Letter Carriers president Fredric Rolando is
right when he says: "Nothing is inevitable about the so-called decline
of the U.S. Postal Service."
What is real, however, is the threat.
Republican leaders in Congress have made proposals for dismembering the US Postal Service
by cutting the number of delivery days, shuttering processing centers
so that it will take longer for letters to arrive, closing thousands of
rural and inner-city post offices and taking additional steps that would
dramatically downsize one of the few national programs ordained by the
original draft of the US Constitution. That scheme won't be implemented
by this Congress. But a half-step in that direction could be made.
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Supposedly "centrist" US Senators
Tom Carper (D-DE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Scott
Brown (R-MA) have developed a series of proposals they describe as a
"bipartisan consensus" for a death by slower cuts.
Their "21st Century Postal Service Act," the latest variation on a
supposed compromise now being weighed by the Senate, would still move
the postal service toward the closing of hundreds of mail processing
centers, the shuttering of thousands of post offices, delays in mail
delivery and a pressuring of consumers toward more expensive
private-sector services. It is, says National Association of Letter
Carriers President Fredric Rolando, "a classic case of "killing the
Post-Office in order to save it.'"
Republicans, and those Democrats who side with them on this issue,
hold that radical surgery is necessary because the postal service is in
financial crisis.
There's only one problem with this diagnosis.
It's wrong.
The postal service is not broke.
At the behest of the Republican-controlled Congress of the
Bush-Cheney era, the USPS has been forced since 2006 to pre-fund future
retiree health benefits. As the American Postal Workers Union notes,
"This mandate is the primary cause of the agency's financial crisis. No
other government agency or private company bears this burden, which
costs the USPS approximately $5.5 billion annually."
Earlier this year, however, we learned that the pre-funding
requirements have taken so much money from the USPS that -- according to
the postal service's own inspector general -- it has "significantly
exceeded" the level of reserved money that the federal government or
private corporations divert to meet future pension and retiree
healthcare demands. "Using rate-payer funds, it has built a war chest of
over $326 billion to address its future liabilities," acknowledges Postal Service Inspector General David C. Williams.
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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
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