karadin:
reasonandempathy:
For every year since 2006 the single largest, most massive drain on the USPS budget has been retiree funding. In 2011, for example, it owed 5.5 billion to a fund for its retirees. Which sounds like they’re skimping and low on cash, but it entirely misses a key aspect.
They’re paying for employees 75 years in the future. They are paying for the benefits of employees who are not born yet and for their children, who themselves are not born yet and will also serve 20 years in the USPS.
Put into law by a republican Congress and signed by G.W. Bush before the Democrats took over in 2007 (it was signed December 20th, 2006), it mandates that $5.5 billion, every year since 2007, in order to pre-fund health benefits and pensions until 2071.
It’s handled and detailed in-depth in Title 8 of the bill. It’s a big bill and dense as hell, so I don’t particularly blame people for not getting it. Here’s a USPS summary of the impact the bill has had.
Okay, let’s compare the deficit, per year, to the Congress-Mandated payments per-year. For the record, the USPS doesn’t get federal funding. As a national governmental agency it is exempt from local laws such as real estate taxes, but that is the extent, and those exemptions are never factored into conversations about the CIA or FBI, and as such don’t belong in this conversation.
In 2016 the USPS was $5.59 billion in deficit, and had to pay 5.8 billion to this fund. Meaning, without the weight of this it would be 210 million net revenue.
2015 had the USPS at 4.9 billion behind, with a 5.7 billion payment. Continuing from that report, 2014 was $5.3 billion behind with a $5.7B payment. 2013 was $4.8B and a $5.6B payment.
Look, that isn’t to say that the USPS would be a perfect organization without this biil; it would be treading water but still positive. Even the Conservative RStreet.org points this out and demonstrates that the USPS is still functional.
Apply that chart to any company that wasn’t the USPS and you’ll see a few years or turmoil that has significantly straightened itself out, and a positive trend for years now at this point (which is why I included numbers from 2015 and 2016 and how their financial situation is only getting better).
Here’s, let’s look at the price and value of IBM over time.
Notice the huge drop in 2008 and 2009, where it took IBM two years to recover?
Here’s Home Depot taking 3 years to recover from 2008.
Microsoft
It’s almost like everyone took multiple years to recover from losing a ton of money and value from a huge downturn in 2008 and 2009. But by 2011/2012 they all managed to do that.
And hey, look. The USPS righted themselves out in 2013 and since then have been doing just fine. They’re not breaking land speed records, but every year their revenues are growing and their cash flow is improving.
TLDR; The Post Office is functioning at a healthy level with slow but constant improvements and is operating in the black, other than Republicans fucking with its budget 11 years ago. They changed the law to give the USPS massive debts that no other company in the world has to deal with in an effort to convince people that “Government Doesn’t Work”.
The government isn’t working because they keep trying to break it.
The goal was to force the privatization of the USPS and then steal billions in the pension fund they had forced them to accumulate (for years before this USPS had had a surplus in the billions and they forced them to pay it down)
The USPS is also one of the largest unions in the country, so Republicans planned to kill two birds with one stone, yet despite all this, the USPS is still the most efficient, reliable and less expensive (for the daily door to door service everywhere in the country) postal service in the world.
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