Many of us have been highly critical of the decision of President Obama to allow our involvement in the Iraq and Afghan wars to continue. We continue to lose men and women in these countries and spend billions of badly needed revenue in countries where we are increasing despised. Indeed, Iraq is now becoming one of Iran’s closest allies and supporting that country in conflicts with the United States. While accepting hundreds of billions, Karzai has called the U.S. the enemy and said that he wished that he was fighting with the Taliban. We have been comparing the costs bankruptcies of cities and closing of programs with the billions spent or simply lost to corruption in these countries, particularly Afghanistan where the Karzai government has reportedly allowed billions to be stolen by Karzai family and associates. Now our postal system is facing default and its future is again in doubt. While Congress is unsure of whether to save this basic service for citizens, it has done little as many billions of dollars are stolen or wasted in countries like Afghanistan. It is perfectly insane.
The Postal Service will default unless it can secure $5.5 billion by August 1st. While service will continue after the default, it shows how uncertain the future of the service has become. The money is needed for its 2012 retiree health payment.
There is no question that the postal service needed reforms in light of new technology and consumer habits. However, it remains a basic function of governance. It is losing billions. I agree with critics in Congress that that is unacceptable. However, I remain amazed by the disconnect. These members are up in arms over a few billion while remaining silent on the loss of hundreds of billions in these continuing wars. We continue to fight over cutting scientific programs, educational programs, and basic services to often save less than a billion at a time while literally billions have disappeared in these countries. The public does not support these wars (while supporting our troops) and wants our involvement to end. They would clearly want this money spent here at home. Yet, there is not only a disconnect in logic but politics on the issue. I fail to understand why there is not greater outcry over this lack of priority in Congress.
Source: WSJ
Pardon me, it’s me again.
As soon as you return to IRL, it confirms TonyC’s idea.
I mean the one where politicians play to the stupid IQ<85 group with their own idiotic ideas.
Alan Grayson in his email today reports, in reply to accusations made by his opponent, that Alan's position is:
"I would like to assure my opponent, and all other right-wing paranoid crackpots, that I will neither eliminate children's lemonade stands, nor triple the price of gasoline, nor outlaw guns and ammunition."
Feel reassured now that all is well with our union tonight? Your kids are free, at least from Alan, to put up the lemonade stand tomorrow next to the freeway with happy tourists visiting Florida thanks to a low gasoline price.
The bit I liked best was Alan's assertion that his opponent collects velvet paintings. Where does that put the opponent on the IQ scale, somewhere just above the price of lemonade. 25, cents that is.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/935/2950293/Lawmakers-upset-over-new-revelations-of-GSA-spending
This is small change.
TonyC,
Quick reflection brings a realization that your scheme describes the Republicans standing dogma and current batch of change experiments offered this time for the 85’s and under consideration.
How many 4 year terms before replacement of SS by
privatized insurance systems with death panels to increase the profit to the survivng ones.
Any bets? Anybody?
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Congratulations, your DNA group was selected for
advancement to next year’s selection round.
Your selection machine should be showing right now with a red or green indicator how it went for just you in this year’s selection. Where is it. Why in your left breast pocket as given by law…..also known on other occasions as your Tracker, also formerly known as cell. You’re always in touch with your tracker. Happiness guaranteed by your President.
Practice makes perfect, you have heard that. And we practice lots—-on you and your happiness.
And that ends this weeks round of the Holocaust Game, brought to you by Exxon, Montsanto and your own President. Next week it is Missouri up for grabs. And now the National Anthem, sung by…..!
TonyC.
Entertaining summation. And true of course.
We had a CEO who sponsored, ie OK’d, 3 major failures. Never gave pause to his advancement I could give the name of the intl company of once 110,000 strong, but won’t.
As for politicians: guess that’s why Adlai Stevenson and Jimmy Carter did not appeal.
So that’s Obama’s dilemma, after promising nebulous change one time what do you do for an encore?
Or an odd reuse of a formulation pops into my mind.
Once stupid, twice shy!
As for the 85 and under category, how quickly can we breed a better race. Right now the current selection process seems to have another direction.
At some point perhaps they plan that robots and we will meet at the same level, and then the real battle begins. What do we do then? Say baaaahhh!???
Pardon if I use you as a straight man. Can’t surpass your richness anyway, so no contest.
@Idealist: Idiot projects get votes. It looks like leadership and creativity. Even when it fails, it looks like you tried to make a difference. Maintaining the system does not, it looks like laziness and getting paid for doing nothing. Budget cutting looks like courageous rebellion against waste, even when the budget is reasonable. Saying a budget is reasonable looks like corruption or incompetence. Unless it is the military budget, then it looks traitorous, because it isn’t “supporting our troops” to cut their budget.
Politicians pitch to dimwits with an IQ of about 85, because it works. Really, it does, and those in the past that have tried for a higher bar have failed.
Why is there always funds available for idiot projects and none for our childrens’ education?
Because we have so many idiots at the top whose power expands as their budgets do.
Besides, kids can’t vote and their parents can’t get time off to do so, and now they are closing the sunday voting before election Tuesday.
USPS??? Wasn’t it a paperless society they promised us. Trees don’t grow fast enough to keep McD and the FF industry fed with paper.
Fortunately, the newspaper industry is dying. But reading of scrap litterature is expanding rapidly.
Shall we adopt desert toilet practices instead. Good thing we have two hands. God figured out the bisymetrical system most higher organisms follow. He foresaw our needs. Unfortunately the IQ given us was too abymsmally low.
That should be enough tangents to keep you occupied.
The deliberately caused USPS deficit could be rectified by a simple technique:
(Star Tribune). Imagine the uproar if the USPS was that financially reckless.
Nice post Mike
While other commenters are properly concerned with the fate of the Postal system, etc, I am stuck on the mind exploding comparison object.
Our eternal wars and our ineffectual efforts and statecraft strategies in the ME and PakAf.
“Indeed, Iraq is now becoming one of Iran’s closest allies…..” ´says JT.
This for the surprised was published (and noted by me here in a comment lately) in Robert Baer’s book: The Devil We Know, published in 2008. The shias (ie Iranian potential agents and actual now) are the majority group, and Iran has, as Baer shows, great control. From the beginning of the oil ministry, etc.
Perfectly insane, JT says. Perfect corruption by our representatives, I say.
And one may use reductive measures to define the causes and eventual leverage points for corrective measures. But I wiil instead summarize by saying the whole is but another ecpression of a corporative takeover of America.
I will repeat what Frankly said because it IS the problem:
“This crisis was brought on by Congress mandating that USPS fund 100% of the next 75 years of retirement now. Had the Post Office been allowed to fund normally they would have had a surplus until just this past year (the surplus as all previous ones would have been slurped down to hide the real damage being done by the massive, indefensible income tax cuts passed under W) and even last years shortfall would have been easily manageable.
The Republicans wanted this crisis, they created this crisis and now will use it to attack government services, unions and the common good. Its what they do now”
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Right now, both UPS and Fed Ex have contracts with the USPS to deliver in areas that they choose to not serve. My UPS packages are dropped at the local post office for me to pick up.
The post office does not get tax dollars to operate, although it does benefit indirectly. It would help if Congress, in addition to rescinding the requirement for funding employee retirement health plan beyond all others, were to use its own budget to pay for its mail.
This is a Congress-created problem that would go away if they were to leave the post office to fund its retirement plan the way other businesses are required to do. They might also use part of their own budget to pay for their franking privileges instead of riding on the USPS for free.
Another suggestion: increase the rates for corporate bulk mail, especially catalogs. (Personal pet peeve: catalog once a week from one company, catalog once a month from two other companies. They get dropped in the PO recycling bin unopened, as well as any other catalogs that come once a year.)
The economics of the situation are obvious. Conservatives have passed seemingly innocent requirements than ensure the USPS has problems, both with pension payments and in their ability to modernize operations. This is a matter of ideology, rather than a dedication to doing the work of our country.
The Conservative Meme, which is based on an unsustainable belief in the “market” always being right, is that government bureaucracy is unable to correctly perform even the most basic of services. It is this destructive meme that causes politicians to continually try to dismantle services that had been considered part of governments role since our Constitution was put in place.
One of these services was the USPS. Having at one time or another used the Post Office and its competitors I’ve found the service about equal, with USPS being far less expensive. While true that for certain specific services UPS and Fed Ex exceed USPS, for the general mail/package delivery needs of the American people the USPS does just fine. However, in order to fulfill the self fulfilling prophecy of “market” economics the USPS must be destroyed and with it a basic service of government.
As another example of the destructiveness of trying to create a reality from this unproven meme of government incompetence, we have the private prisons. The very idea of incarcerating criminals within a for-profit system is to my mind barbaric. We see the barbarity in the two Judges from Pennsylvania who were incarcerating youngsters in private Juvenile Facilities without valid reasons, while accepting payments from those facilities.
As long as the national discussion blandly accepts an unproven (and to my mind false) proposition that the “free market” operates better than any government bureaucracy, we will be saddled with “faith based economics” such as that of Von Mises, Rothbard and Rand. We will also be saddled with
Faux Economic gurus who achieve control of the Fed and our Treasury and are little more than religious fundamentalists of the economic kind.
I would also point out that in more rational countries, they simply charge more for the stamp to provide the same service. Our stamp is 41c. For the equivalent of our first-class mail service Germany charges 49c, Britain charges 71c, and Japan charges 75c.
If we raised the stamp to 60c, in line with other industrialized countries, we would increase annual postal revenue by $33B (it is currently about $75B).
If I were in charge of the USPS, I would propose just rolling back the service to save money. The postal service has not always had home delivery; it used to just have post offices and you went and picked up your mail.
E-mail and the Internet has taken over many of the routine operations of first class mail; if I buy something online my receipt comes by email or is just shown on the screen. The only thing I really need the post office for is items (like a contract, recently) that require my actual signature on paper.
So here is my proposal: Do mail delivery like we do the trash collection and recycling collections; twice a week. Just like them, rotate the days by neighborhood. If Mail is delivered Mon-Sat, you get mail on Mon-Thu, Tue-Fri, or Wed-Sat. If you need something before then, go to the post office and check your box.
As automated as they already are, it would not be difficult to add an Internet site and automated telephone script, just provide your address and they can tell you how many pieces of mail are currently scheduled for delivery. They could even show you the digital pictures of each item in your bin; so if you are waiting for a contract or check, you can inquire as often as you wish, and go collect it when it comes in.
Adding two days to delivery times would not really hurt any functions and I doubt it would cause any legal issues; first class mail service already has that level of unpredictability anyway.
However, it would reduce the staff required significantly. Not the sorting operations, but the delivery miles driven would be decreased about 60%, as would wear-and-tear on the trucks, and the number of trucks and mail carriers would probably be decreased 40%-50%.
Raise the price of postage and you are done.
There is no reason the USPS could not be a break-even enterprise; but like any service it should respond to the demand level of consumers, and should charge enough to cover its costs and maintain a reserve. If people (as represented by Congress) do not WANT to pay what it costs to provide the high level of service the USPS can provide, their service can be scaled back in stages.
Like I said before, they do not have to deliver AT ALL, it used to be a pick-up service exclusively. Ironically, I think if the USPS was LESS convenient and people had to go pick up their mail, the exposure to mail workers and facilities and lines would make people more willing to fund the operations!
People are irrational that way. Out of sight, out of mind: When we do not stand in line at all, when our mail magically appears in our box without any effort on our part at all, it is easy to ignore the people and machinery making that happen and focus on the price of a stamp and demand it be lower. When you see actual people working as steadily as any other business and getting stuff done, it is easier to conclude they just do not have enough people and are under-funded.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/6546/republicans-seek-to-end-the-u-s-postal-service&op=#comment-114142
In 2007, 08, 09 , 10 The USPS paid 22 billion $ to the government to “Pre Pay” future retiree health benefits. The downturn in economy, rising gas prices, and yes the Internet has seriously wacked the financial balance of the USPS.
The 10 Billion dollars is what the government says is owed by the PO. The prepayments were not made in 2011, nor 2012.
In 2006 when this act was passed, the outlook was much brighter, and congress set the PO up to be a cash cow for its own spending excesses. Oops that optimism blew up in 2009.
There are many private entrepeneurs that want to privatize the PO. The repubs are eager to privatize the PO. IMO the postmaster is a pawn of the privatizeers. A for profit PO will be very different than our current system.
The enlightened solution is beyond my ken, but this is 100% true, “If the PO is broken up, and privatized, this universal non profit, that serves every American will never be re-instituted”. Once it’s gone..It’s gone.
The infrastucture is amazing, its capabilities immense, there are untapped potentials within it. The vultures are circling, eyeing tremendous private profits to be made, and leaving the bulk of this magnificent creation out to rot in the sun. Letting the USPS die is not American exceptionalism, it is private profit extremism. And the public will pay.
This crisis was brought on by Congress mandating that USPS fund 100% of the next 75 years of retirement now. Had the Post Office been allowed to fund normally they would have had a surplus until just this past year (the surplus as all previous ones would have been slurped down to hide the real damage being done by the massive, indefensible income tax cuts passed under W) and even last years shortfall would have been easily manageable.
The Republicans wanted this crisis, they created this crisis and now will use it to attack government services, unions and the common good. Its what they do now
P.S. The USPS delivered about 175 billion pieces of mail last year; from postcards to large packages. They can make up a $5.5B shortfall with an average increase in postage of 3.15 cents per piece. Which might mean a 3c increase in the price of a first class stamp. Would anybody really notice?
“Now our postal system is facing default and its future is again in doubt. While Congress is unsure of whether to save this basic service for citizens, it has done little as many billions of dollars are stolen or wasted in countries like Afghanistan. It is perfectly insane.”
Well said.
I think there is not greater outcry because there has been no actual pain of terminating the service. If mail service ended, everybody would be up in arms.
In the meantime, budgetary disputes that do not cause widespread pain do not cause outrage; they are seen as routine.
I believe the strategy (which I think works) is to slowly defund services until they are so crappy people give up on them, view them with disdain, and welcome the end of them so private for-profit businesses can take over the function and bleed people over it.
It is hard for the private sector to compete with a zero-profit enterprise, unless their Congressional minions cripple the zero-profit enterprise to make it an easy target. Get ready for the FedEx $9.95 first class letter…
Yes, but think of all those big fat political donations by Fed Ex and UPS. They’ll make out big time when the P.O. is privatized. Of course, You can forget about sending a letter for 44 cents. Or house to house delivery 6 days a week. Or daily pick up out going mail. Or having a regular mail carrier who knows the neighborhood and watches out for elderly patrons.
America, you’re gonna miss us when we’re gone.
The post office was never designed to make a profit…. If so, it’d be cost based…… We are as used to the post person as baseball, hotdog, apple pie and Chevrolet…… Give me the money….. By the way….it’s one of the few companies that require payment in advance for future health care benefits…… Where’s Michael Milliken when you need him…..