The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

They also foist last-mile delivery off on the USPS when they can’t be arsed to do it their damn selves, probably because it’s cheaper to leave small packages at the post office than drive a truck of their own a couple miles out of their way to drop one package.

Source: FedEx does this to us all the damned time. UPS generally delivers to our door in a brown truck. I don’t know about DHL.

Let’s not pretend that other couriers offer the same service as the USPS (specifically universal service) in a competitive market while also turning a profit.

Which legal obligations that it's competitors don't have? If you're talking about the requirement to pre-fund their pension fund, my understanding is that UPS and FedEx (and all private corporations) were already required to do so. I think it's more accurate to say that PAEA removed an artificial advantage that USPS had.

OTOH, FedEx responded to MAP-21 and similar pension funding laws by getting rid of their pension fund which I suppose isn't something USPS can do as easily. On the third hand, UPS is still able to afford pensions for union employees.

Sweden's schools follow national educational guidelines so they are more like what we call charter schools in the U.S. than the voucher system some districts have in the U.S. and what DeVos argues for. Also, Sweden's students perform more poorly now than they did before vouchers were implemented, though of course people argue over the cause of the decline.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/is-sweden-proof-that-...

> it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit.

You're skirting the primary issue. This "cost" is manufactured and is a burden that no other entity (private or governmental) even comes close to having to bear. It's all in the submitted article but here's more. From [0]:

>Passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, the PAEA gave the Postal Service new accounting and funding rules for its retiree pension and health benefits. Up until 2006, the USPS funded those obligations on a pay-as-you-go-basis, pulling out of its pension fund and adding to it as retirees' costs came in. But the PAEA required the Postal Service to calculate all of its likely pension costs over the next 75 years, and then sock away enough money between 2007 and 2016 to cover most of them.

>This is one of those ideas that sounds responsible on the surface but is actually pretty nuts.

>Consider your average 30-year mortgage. What if you had to set aside a few hundred thousand dollars right now, enough to pay the whole thing, even if you were still going to make payments over 30 years? No one would ever take out a mortgage. That's the whole point: the costs only come in over time, and the income you use to pay them comes in over time as well. It works exactly the same for retiree pensions and benefit funds. Which is why, as economist Dean Baker pointed out to Congress, pretty much no one else does what the PAEA demanded of the Postal Service.

>Meeting Congress' arbitrary mandate required putting away an extra $5.6 billion per year. "It is equivalent to imposing a tax of 8 percent on the Postal Service's revenue," Baker said. "There are few businesses that would be able to survive if they were suddenly required to pay an 8 percent tax from which their competitors were exempted."

Then, citing a quote form the Postmaster General that contradicts your position, you said:

> This is where pension prefunding comes into play. The USPS is running out of cash and if they didn't have to save it would take them longer to do so. But since they're not actually making the payments the law doesn't impact their cash position.

But they made payments from 2007 to 2012 (at the expense of modernizing). The Inspector General is pretty clear on this (emphasis mine) [0]:

> Eventually, the burden became too great, and the USPS began defaulting on the PAEA payments in 2012. But the damage was done. The Postal Service lost $62.4 billion between 2007 and 2016, and its own Inspector General attributed $54.8 billion of that to prefunding retiree benefits. Without the PAEA, the Postal Service wouldn't be doing stellar. (Though you could plausibly blame many of its remaining struggles on the Great Recession.) But it probably would've spent at least part of the last decade making comfortable profits.

> "The Postal Service's $15 billion debt is a direct result of the mandate," the Inspector General wrote in 2015. "This requirement has deprived the Postal Service of the opportunity to invest in capital projects and research and development."

And from [1]:

>The deep hole of debt that is currently facing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is entirely due to the burdensome prepayments for future retiree health care benefits imposed by Congress in the PAEA. 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.

[0]: https://theweek.com/articles/767184/how-george-bush-broke-po... [1]: https://mronline.org/2011/09/23/the-manufactured-financial-c...

See also: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-04/congre...

Side note: Admittedly, these are opinions pieces but appear to be well sourced (especially [1]). If you have any numbers or quotes that contradict these then by all means provide them.

This is most important imo. We are granted certain protections with USPS that will likely never exist with private carriers.

The USPIS needs probably cause to open your mail, as it's protected under the Fourth Amendment.

Meanwhile at Fedex or UPS, the little old nosy lady at the counter can bust into any package she finds "suspicious". And you have no recourse.

I'm not sure how many people realize this.