Ed Schultz goes off on the gutting of the post office by US Congress

[geefloyd46]

[link:http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/04/ed-schultz-goes-off-on-gutting-of-post.html|

[Rhiannon12866]

1. K&R. Good for Big Ed!

[newrocker]

2. I think the "gutting" has not been enough.

The USPS needs to have a strategic plan for the continuing decline in postage revenue.

first the growth of faxes in the 70's affecting mostly business mail
then the growth of UPS, and Fedex in the 70's and 80's, affecting parcel post
then the internet/email since the 90's, affecting both 1st class and 3rd class mail

The USPS revenue base has dropped dramatically.

The strategic plan should count on a continuing decline in revenue for USPS, IMO. Ten years from now it might be half of what it is now. We need to be aggressive about closing post offices.

(My local post office is slated to be closed this year. I won't miss it - I've average going there less than once a year. I can get my stamps elsewhere.)

[geefloyd46]

3. The talking points of the people who want to kill off the PO has clearly sunk in.

These are the standard talking points. Why will the US the only industrial country without the ability to send one another a letter. This is a huge pool of unemployed people dropped on the economy. It also hurts every business that the post office subsidizes (netflix for one). What do you think the price of postage will happen at FEDEX and UPS once they finish off competition.

[Frustratedlady]

4. Absolutely! You are right on.

Just because some people don't need/use the USPS, many people depend on it. The elderly, those without computers, the rural communities, those of us who get meds, etc.

FE and UPS will raise the price and lower the service. They already hate home delivery, so how can anyone think they will be an improvement? I ship all the time and USPS is the most dependable...they don't charge extra for those out-of-the-way deliveries to rural or hard to find addresses, either. Over all, they are the best and would still be getting most of the shipping business if they hadn't raised the prices and gone into the zoning fees. They only had to do that because of the new law to pay ahead on retirement/insurance.

Congress must turn this around, or they will totally screw up our system. It's going to take years to get this country back on-track from all the damage they've done with state legislatures and federal. You can't just snap your fingers and return to reality. ALEC's power must be decimated and we must return the House to the Democrats before the Pugs totally ruin our economy and daily lives.

[customerserviceguy]

8. I find the use of the phrase 'talking points'

to often indicate an unwilliness to take the poster's arguments on. It seems intellectually lazy to me.

We're always going to be able to send each other a letter, it's just that the folks who want to take quill pen to parchment will have to pay the costs of it someday. The rest of us will get by just fine with electronic communications. At the turn of the 20th Century, we had quite an infrastructure around horses, too, and now they're just expensive pets rather than something the economy fundamentally runs on.

Here's news for you: Netflix is changing over rapidly to the Internet-delivery model of renting movies. All we need is decent broadband for 90% of the population, and they may well discontinue mailing disks.

I do concede that UPS and FedEx may raise rates after the USPS is a mere shadow of its former self. However, that will simply drive more communications to electronic means. Remember, if people don't want to bother with getting or paying a bill with USPS, they're sure not going to pay five bucks a whack for FedEx to do it, either. About all that will need to be delivered is goods, and for folks who don't want to have to shop at a brick and mortar store, they'll just have to pay the freight that it costs to get things sent across the country. Here's another bit of news: Most big shippers can negotiate rates with UPS and FedEx for far less than you and I. Eventually, somebody might start a competing delivery service aimed at the niche market of people who buy and sell on FleaBay.

[geefloyd46]

11. Any other government service we should privatize

The key is the 75 years and providing retirement for workers that aren't even born yet. That is not a bill that is designed to reform anything that is a bill designed to kill what it is suppose to be helping. The fact is that without this bill the post office actually makes money. That's like the US Congress creates a huge problem and then says "look we've got a problem here." The idea of killing something that is designed to further communication as being a positive good is something I frankly find a little confusing. I don't see other industrialized countries trying to kill off their own communication systems. To my mind, decisions like that take us one step closer on our path to the third world. And frankly, if you want to get there hop on a plane there's quicker ways to live in a third world country.

[customerserviceguy]

12. It's not a matter of privatizing a government service

It's about that service becoming obsolete. Perhaps not completely, but the USPS simply will not carry the volume of communications that it did at it's founding as a quasi-governmental corporation forty years ago. Back then, "air mail" was a special rarity that the sender paid extra for, now the all coast-to-coast mail goes that way. Technology has changed the way mail has been handled, and now it's substantially out of the hands of the USPS.

At this point, the USPS is just a delivery system for forest-raping junk mail. If you were to double the cost of sending junk mail as often as needed, you'd be able to pay the bills of the USPS, even if you think they're putting too much away in their retirement program. Like I said, I consider the projections to be pie-in-the-sky, most retirement funds are woefully underfunded, it might be refreshing to see a properly funded one.

[geefloyd46]

13. That is exactly what it is

Another way to save the post office is just get the US Congress out of their business. Politicians should solve problems not create them. It's about time that such politicians stop being shills for the highest bidder, in this time I'd look at contributions coming from FedEX and UPS. The first thing they did was allow unlimited money in politics, citizens united, and call it free speech. The only ones with the power to compete with corporations are actually unions. Step two is to kill the unions. The largest union in the country is the post office. In the end you have one voice broadcasting on the television: it's called your corporate overlords.

[customerserviceguy]

14. Ok, if we get the Congress out of that business

Haven't we fully privatized the USPS? If a governmental (or quasi-governmental) agency no longer has any oversight or regulation by Congress, isn't it a fully separate entity from the government?

Of course, I would suppose that the CIA functions that way...

[geefloyd46]

15. Unfortunately I trust my postman more than I do my supposed "elected" officials.

[customerserviceguy]

16. And my postman

is a great guy, I trust him way more than I do most of the management where I work. But your letter carrier and mine don't make policy.

As long as the government subsidizes the USPS, it needs government oversight. If it is set free, then it is essentially privatized. I was attempting to point out the fallacy in your plea to have Congress keep its hands off of the Postal Service.

[geefloyd46]

17. And I go back to my point

And I go back to my position that congress needs over-site even more rather than operating as an ATM machine as they currently do. That is no over-site there either; just bribery. Just a dead public service and some people in the shadows who paid money in campaign contributions to kill it off.

[customerserviceguy]

18. In theory, it's with the electorate

But, we know how that works.

In any case, whatever Congress does or doesn't do, the USPS is already set on a collision course with technology. At one point, they thought they could get ahead of the curve with the Mailgram, but since that idea, they don't seem to have had too many new ones. Frankly, if it weren't for FleaBay, I doubt they'd have much parcel business at all. In a way, technology threw them a lifeline, but it's not going to be enough to let them survive.

Is there anything wrong with my idea of upping the price of sending junk mail?

[geefloyd46]

19. No argument with that

I'd have no trouble with the post office innovating and doing whatever it takes to make themselves competitive in the modern age. What I do resent is them going under after being targeted in a phony issue that the US Congress helped create.

[ljm2002]

6. How nice for you that YOU won't miss your local post office...

...some of us depend on the USPS for various things, including the ability to ship stuff for small home-based businesses.

How interesting that you totally neglect to address the issue that Ed Schultz brings up, namely, the onerous burden of having to finance their retirement system 75 years into the future. Please cite for us ANY other business ANYWHERE who must meet such a burden. I will be very interested to see if you can do so.

I prefer to us USPS over UPS and FedEx because they are more cost-effective. Both UPS and FedEx cost considerably more when sending packages. What do you think will happen if the USPS is privatized? My bet is on prices going up.

The Constitution empowers Congress "To establish post offices and post roads". Would you be one of those "strict constructionists"? If so, how do you square that with abolishing OUR postal service, when it is one of the few services specifically mentioned in the Constitution?

[customerserviceguy]

9. As for finanacing that retirement system

Most businesses that pay pensions do it pretty much out of current earnings. Once a business goes belly-up, it's pensioners are often left out in the cold. Why not have long-term financing for an entity that will shrink to a fraction of itself in less than a mere generation from now?

As for 75 year predictions, I'd say that just about every prediction over ten years is pure speculation and imagination. If I were dependent on a retirement system, I'd rather that they erred on the side of caution, as opposed to seeing just how close to the bone they can cut things with fancy accounting tricks. That's what we saw happening 25-30 years ago, when companies used the unsustainable high interest rates of the Eighties as the mathematical excuse to loot pension funds.

No thanks.

[ljm2002]

20. Nice sleight of hand, there...

...where you talk around the pension issue with a bunch of hand-waving but neglect to address the central question in my post:

Please cite for us ANY other business ANYWHERE who must meet such a burden.

As I suspected, you cannot do so. So you can hand-wave all you want about what happens to pension systems when companies go belly-up, or whether any 75-year prediction is worth the paper it's written on. In the meantime, companies continue to finance their pension plans, and there are standard practices for doing so. Standard practices do not include financing pensions 75 years into the future, and packing that financing into a 10-year period.

[customerserviceguy]

21. I cannot cite any such business

Yes, part of solving the USPS's problem might be to slack off on how much they have to put away for future retirees. I guess it makes no sense to have those people provided for on any more than the shoestrings that most public pension systems currently operate on. But those governments are not going to go away, even if the tea partiers take over. On the other hand the USPS will be a mere shadow of its present self in less than a generation.

Standard practices, indeed. Standard practices are what gets us the BP oil spill disaster. I guess if you want such thinking applied to postal workers, then so be it. I'm not one of them.

[customerserviceguy]

7. Don't forget all of the people

who get their magazines to their netbooks and tablets, as well. I'm sure that used to be some pretty good money for the USPS in the good old days.

You are absolutely correct, the USPS needs to plan for it's eventual disappearance.

[bbgrunt]

5. you never know what you've got 'til it's gone.

[DeSwiss]

10. K&R

[font color=darkred]PERSPECTIVE {per-spek-tiv} (noun) -
1.

a. A view or vista.
b. A mental view or outlook.

Example: ''The US Postal Service is about $8 billion in the red -- while the Pentagon spends $20 billion a year just on air-conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan.''

[/font][/center]