Not sure where you read this, but it's false. The US feds pay for their retirements out of payroll deductions...except for two agencies - one being the Postal Service. They were allowed (many years ago) to make bulk payments to OPM on behalf of their employees - instead of every pay period. Then the Postal Service started losing money and decided that one of their "cuts" was to delay their retirement contributions - so they got way behind on their payments. So then what should the gov't do? Who is going to pay for the retirements the employees were legally entitled to (and THEY paid for) - but not paid by the USPS? You would think Democrats would want to stick up for these poor, hardworking employees. All Congress did was force them to pay their bills. Is that where things are these days? The lefties think financial commitments and contracts are optional and the righties insist on people paying their bills...because I'm starting to notice a pattern here.
Banks are closing left and right, there will be no such thing as physical banks in the future to walk in and do your banking, everything will be digital, when is the last time you walked into a post office?? damn they have no clue what they are doing, they have lost billions and billions of dollars and now their thinking of becoming a bank? This is a joke right? This idea is not going to work, I think this was just a rumor that got away as something being a real possibility, if anything this cannot happen, no one and I mean no one is going to use their post office as a bank....unless they can give you 3-4% on your savings and a 7% 5 year CD then they could steal every customer from every big bank in the US and become the biggest bank in the world, but thats wishful thinking as this is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN
for disclosure purposes do you have relatives or friends who work or have worked for the post office?
The army should be privatized, not the PO. It has been a profitable business unless you count that Congressional order of making it to fund its retirement for 2000 years or so...
it is the same remark to you. for disclosure purposes do you have relatives or friends who work or have worked for the post office? profits have nothing to do with it. the government in a capitalist society should not be involved in a business and on top particularly one where they have monopoly power, delivery of 1st class mail.
No I don't have postal worker relatives, but why would it matter? I assume in most countries mail delivery is ran by the government, so why would it be such a huge deal? Now if we add that they actually made money, thus they weren't a money sucking entity on the public's tits, I don't see the need for privatization. And last time I checked there are at least 3 more major delivery companies, so monopoly it isn't. Just see how much it cost with UPS or DHL to send a small letter from Florida to Alaska... And Surf is an idiot as usual for being surprised, when you have so many locations and you are dealing with money and competing with free email, you have to make the best of the situation...
that is not first class mail which is a monopoly of the US Postal Service. therefore the statement is meaningless.
Stupid and irrelevant question. Amusing that you think the only people who should be concerned about the fate of the USPS are those with personal connections. It is a vital agency, regardless of whether YOU think so or use it or not.
A Manufactured ‘Crisis': Congress Can Let The Post Office Save Itself Without Mass Layoffs Or Service Reductions BY ZAID JILANI SEP 28, 2011 11:40AM 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. By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion). This $19.5 billion deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion. 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. It’s up to Congress to act to allow the Post Office to save itself, lest it become a victim of a crisis that Congress itself manufactured. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis-post-office-save-itself/