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This isn't my first post on this. Did I have it right or what?
1. First came laws requiring the 200-year-old United States Postal Service to start paying entirely for itself, NO taxpayer support.
2. That didn't work. It COULD support itself. So second came a number of laws designed to cripple our USPS, including some by making it illegal to deliver certain types of high-profit deliveries -- benefiting giant private delivery corporations that couldn't compete with the highly-efficient USPS.
3. Next comes phasing out door-to-door-delivery.
5. Next comes privatization of this giant cash cow. There's gold in them deliveries. Expect massive price hikes for far less service. Once FedEx doesn't have to compete with the USPS, we will be driving to FedEx's warehouse to pick up packages that don't fit in the standard kiosk mailbox we're assigned.
6. Next comes explaining to our grandchildren was a mailman was.
Unless we say NO. And I respectfully suggest we do just that.
From the Washington Post:
A Republican plan to stabilize the financially struggling U.S. Postal Service by dropping Saturday letter delivery, phasing out door-to-door service and removing no-layoff clauses from future union contracts cleared a key House committee late Wednesday.
The legislation, spearheaded by Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), backs down from some of his proposals in the last Congress, which failed to agree on a restructuring plan.
More from PostPolitics
Republicans are embracing the term as a way of reminding voters of Democratic men who have cheated, sexted, and harassed.
The spokeswoman explained later that she thought the conversation had been off the record.
Lots of Republicans got snookered when they recited misleadingly presented poll data.
The President and John Boeher don't trust each other. That bodes poorly for the fall.
The bill passed 22 to 17 on a party-line vote; Democrats disagree with several provisions that they said would hurt labor unions. Even if the plan passes the GOP-controlled House, it needs the approval of the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“The Postal Service isn’t just broke,” Issa said before lawmakers debated his bill, noting that the agency is facing insolvency. He described the mail system as an “absolute federal entity that delivers your right to communicate and be communicated with. It must be saved.”
The agency lost close to $16 billion in the last fiscal year as mail volume continued to plummet. Postal Service officials defaulted on two $5.5 billion payments to set aside health care for future retirees, another financial burden causing huge losses.
As its revenue has fallen, the agency said it is hampered by more workers and facilities than it needs. By law, it cannot raise prices faster than the rate of inflation. Legal restrictions also keep it from easily expanding into new products or services.
Congress has worked to address these obstacles for two years but has bumped up against competing demands of unions, mailers and lawmakers representing rural districts.
Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Postal Service, said he plans to introduce a Senate bill soon. “While we differ in our approach in some areas, Chairman Issa and I are united in our commitment to restoring the Postal Service to solvency,” Carper said in a statement.
Issa’s bill rolls back previous proposals to close money-losing post offices and force labor unions to open existing contracts to eliminate no-layoff rules. Those rules would change only in future pacts, a concession to unions and Democrats.
The bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) and Dennis A. Ross (R-Fla.), also includes some Democratic priorities, among them easing restrictions on new lines of business. It also would give the Postal Service a break on the annual fixed payments it makes for retiree health costs and switch to an actuarial model that’s also favored by Democrats.
But the biggest stumbling blocks for Democrats were the changes to when and where mail is delivered.
“The bill before us today contains extreme provisions that would degrade the Postal Service,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the oversight committee’s top Democrat, calling the bill “partisan” while acknowledging that it had improved.
Democrats have long opposed five-day delivery because the change would threaten the jobs of thousands of letter carriers and other Postal Service employees.
Republicans also have made a priority of phasing out door-to-door delivery in favor of clustered boxes on street corners. The change could save $4 billion annually by 2022, according to Postal Service officials and Issa’s staff.
The Postal Service has gradually been shifting to a centralized delivery system in shopping malls, strip malls and business parks. Cluster boxes have been used in residential construction areas since the 1980s.
In a statement, Postal Service officials said that while door-to-door delivery in older neighborhoods “would allow the Postal Service to deliver mail to more addresses in less time,” the shift in residential neighborhoods is not in its five-year plan.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) questioned whether a curbside system would work in densely populated urban areas with limited space. More broadly, he described Issa’s bill as a GOP effort to “strangle” the Postal Service by turning away customers.
“There is a view that by cutting back service somehow we’re going to revive the Postal Service in America,” Connolly said. “We’re almost surely condemning it to an accelerated decline.”
Republicans turned back about a dozen amendments from Democrats to keep door-to-door delivery, no-layoff rules and other
labor-friendly provisions.
“Today we’re in a different era than the 1970s,” Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.) told Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.) when Lynch tried to keep no-layoff rules. “No-layoff protections have disappeared from the private sector.”
In a statement, the National Association of Letter Carriers called ending door-to-door delivery a “losing proposition” that would hurt the elderly and those who live in areas with extreme weather."
It'll hurt me and not for either of those reasons. This tradition is something I want to conserve. As you'll note from the tone of this article, mentioning only labor union interests (big campaign supporters), neither party in Washington are putting a high priority on saving this wonderful American success story simply because We the People might want to keep it for ourselves, because it's worth a lot to us. There's a LOT of gold in those deliveries for the top 10% of the top 1%--the people who fund election campaigns.
Also note, some neighborhoods may keep door-to-door delivery, but not in the suburbs. If this happens propery values will rise significantly where this tradition and convenience are maintained and drop where it is not, so that door-to-door delivery will become a privilege for the privileged.
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Though this article is from 2012, it still holds true. No matter what the post office comes up with to cut costs, Congress is against it. They're trying to kill the PO, no doubt about it, and it's disgusting.
How Congress is killing the Post Office
By Felix Salmon JULY 20, 2012 (Reuters)
The Post Office’s problems are the same today as they were back in September: the long-term secular decline of postal mail, on the one hand, combined with all manner of Congressionally-mandated restrictions which make a bad situation much, much worse. And now the inevitable has happened: we’re going to have a $5.5 billion default.
A default of that magnitude sounds scarier than it actually is. Congress requires the Post Office to make inordinately huge pension-plan payments, for reasons which nobody can really understand. But in the final analysis, USPS pensions are a government obligation, and it doesn’t make a huge amount of difference whether they come out of a well-funded pension plan, a badly-funded pension plan, or just out of US government revenues.
What does make a lot of difference is the degree to which the Post Office is hamstrung by Congress. There’s still room for the Postal Service to reorient itself and become a successful 21st-century utility — but there’s no way that’s going to happen if it’s constantly on the back foot and if Congress prevents it from entering new businesses, possibly including banking.
To put it another way: the Post Office is broken, in large part thanks to unhelpful meddling by Congress. And it won’t get fixed unless and until Congress gets out of the way and stops forcing it into the corporate equivalent of ketosis, essentially consuming its own flesh in order to survive.
The talking point from the mailing industry here is that multi-billion-dollar defaults “could make consumers lose confidence in the Postal Service”, and thereby make matters even worse. It’s a bit like the argument we saw in Detroit in 2009, when lots of people said that if the big auto makers went bankrupt, no one would buy their cars any more. That argument wasn’t convincing at the time, and it turned out not to be true. Similarly, I’m not worried about that bickering in Washington will directly affect the confidence that Americans have in their postal service.
On the other hand, it’s pretty much certain that bickering in Washington will unnecessarily make the situation at the Post Office much worse than it needs to be. And as such, it’s a prime example of US political dysfunction. As Zero Hedge says, if the muppets in Washington can’t get this right, what are the chances that they’re going to be able to do the right thing when the fiscal cliff arrives at year-end?
Or you can read this one:
Congress ties Potal Service into knots