Or we just subsidize rural postal service, just like we subsidize rural phone and internet service.
It’s real simple. Do you hate rural elderly people, or not?
The hilarious, ironic part is that it’s these exact elderly, rural people who are the ones electing these Randians.
Poor, ignorant rural elderly people. They are voting for the exact people who would take away their postal service, their Social Security, and their Medicare.
They’re voting for their social values, and against their own self-interest. If they were better-informed, and thought this shit through, they might not vote that way, but that’s not how it is.
I wonder how much dismantling of Social Security and Medicare it will take before they wake up.
For a long time I thought the conservatives merely TALKED a good game about dismantling those social programs…but some of the freshman Tea Party congressmen are actually stupid enough to commit political suicide and actually try to DO it. LOL
Part of that problem stems from unreasonable demands being placed on the post office. Another part of it stems from the fact that many Bumfuck, North Dakotas need delivery service. The Bumfuck, North Dakotas of this country are only going to get essential mail services because the government mandates it. The private sector sure as hell isn’t going to step in and make sure that happens because they can’t make a profit from doing so.
What many Reps really want to have happen is for the Fed-Exes of the world to be able to siphon off the profitable sector of the market and leave the feds to do the unprofitable stuff. Why should Americans subsidize their profits?
And, not all of that is directly the Postal Service’s fault.
Due to the control over it by Congress, any changes in its business model has to be approved by that committee, and recently proposed changes (even beyond the pension-funding issue) have been torpedoed by the committee. The USPS has had rate hikes turned down, as well as proposals to eliminate a day per week of mail delivery, and to close / consolidate the smallest local post offices. USPS’s management knows that it needs to adapt; its steering committee won’t allow it to do so.
Actually, we don’t even have to do that. If USPS weren’t saddled with these uniquely draconian requirements for hugely overfunding its pension plan decades in advance, it would be running a surplus right now.
In short, the excess revenue that the Postal Service generates in urban areas could be, and always has been, used to cover its revenue deficits in rural areas.
Agree with you about Tea Party voters sabotaging their own best interests, though. It’s a longstanding American political pattern: a demographic minority of wealthy private-sector business interests finds it politically and financially convenient to weaken the public sector, so they set out to persuade citizens that the public sector is their enemy or at least the hapless source of all their problems.
*"Just look at those fatcat government employees making MORE THAN FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR just for hauling sacks of paper around! And they do that day in, day out, decade after decade and DON’T GET LAID OFF! And then they get PENSIONS and BENEFITS so they can sit around in their small middle-class houses and spend their old age COMFORTABLY!
Doesn’t it just make you sick to see it? What did they do to deserve that kind of humane and respectful treatment from their employer, when you have to put up with so much crap and abuse and insecurity? It’s not fair! GET THEM!! MAKE THEM SUFFER!! SERVE THEM RIGHT!!"*
To the government-haters, though, that just goes to show why the public sector is intrinsically bad. Anti-government conservatives want government not to work, and if it does something that does work, by golly, they’ll make it not work by irresponsibly sabotaging its management. We’re paying them large salaries to deliberately wreck our institutions in order to prove for the convenience of their political masters that our institutions don’t work.
Even more ironically, perhaps, is that they have to use government regulatory measures to achieve this. The USPS is government-owned and yet successful and profitable, and so fails to conform to their ideology. So they use the very mechanism that they assert causes all the ills of society, government over-regulation, to force the USPS to *appear *to be as inefficient as their beliefs tell them it ought to be. IOW to relieve their cognitive dissonance they have to make reality conform to their beliefs.
The parallels with international communism (which, when the worker’s revolution failed to arrive on schedule, had to then try to make happen the very thing they claimed was going to happen of its own accord) are .. well, somewhere between amusing and deeply saddening.
No, the post office’s woes are caused by the 20%+ drop in mail over the last 5 years. Generally speaking, the problem comes from people who think reforming the post office demonstrates hatred of rural elderly or persecution of unions.
They aren’t spending my money. As long as everyone is a willing participant and isn’t being coerced, I don’t care what private sector employees get paid or don’t get paid. It’s when you are taxing me to pay for it that I have an interest.
I have the reality that postal revenues are down. That’s what’s actually happening. Until something else starts to happen, why don’t we focus on what’s actually occurring in the real world instead of what USA today thinks might happen.
The post office is losing money because revenue is down and the workers have pensions that we can’t afford. That might not align with your ideology, but it is the reality as all the cites in this thread have shown.
Are you seriously telling me that someone who has been delivering mail for 35 years is better at it then someone who has been delivering it for a shorter amount of time? How many years, exactly, does it take to master this skill? How long does it take a new worker to become just as efficient as one with decades of experience in this field?
So if we cut their overly generous compensation they are going to start stealing from us? This is great argument to get rid of them all.
Way to walk right into the pinky ring wearing union thug stereotype.
I have no problem with public sector unions. Since they are negotiating with management that has an incentive to strike a reasonable bargain they tend not to result in the excesses that public sector unions do.
If grocery stores were government run I have no doubt that store clerks would make $93,000 a year and would get retirement benefits that would cause my grocery bill to triple.
Good luck with that. Most knowledge workers would sooner quit their company then join a union. They rightly recognize that unions would remove the individual incentive to achieve and be compensated based on performance. If this was a good idea it would be put into place. The reason that no knowledge workers are in unions is that they don’t want to be. And they’re right.
Assuming 25 years of service and a salary that topped out at $70,000 twelve years ago, my quickie calculations indicate that he’s probably getting somewhere around $34,000 annually from the Civil Service Retirement System. He would not be eligible for Social Security benefits, because as a postal employee he would not have paid into the system – his retirement payments and checks into and from the CSRS system, in effect, were his Social Security payments/benefits.
Do you think $34 grand is an unreasonable size of a pension?
Let’s be clear again: nobody is taxing you for postal retiree benefits. Not even your payroll taxes are funding their retirements, since the vast majority of postal retirees would not receive Social Security benefits (unless they also had some other job for which they paid into the Social Security system).
(Actually, it was the technology industry analyst for the well-known technology research firm Gartner whom the USA Today article quoted as predicting this development, so it’s hardly surprising. But hey, why should you pay any attention to the merits of the cite’s actual sources, when you can just automatically sneer at it merely for carrying the USA Today label?)
Nope, the reality is that the “pensions we can’t afford” [who’s “we”, anyway? as has been pointed out to you several times already, the USPS funds pensions and all other overheads from its revenues, not from tax dollars] are actually “draconian pension overfunding requirements imposed on the USPS by anti-government conservatives trying to sabotage it”.
Without the excessive pension overfunding demands made by PAEA, the USPS would be running a surplus, and would be able to afford worker pensions just fine. That might not align with your ideology, but it is the reality.
Gosh, you mean that you think workers shouldn’t get any salary raises once they’ve mastered the basics of their first job task? People who’ve been reliable and increasingly responsible employees for several decades should stay at the same wage they were making a few years in?
No wonder your firm has so much trouble finding good employees. You sound like a real peach to work for.
Wow, another impressively reality-conscious debating position from the famously hardheaded and practical anti-government conservative movement:
:eek: *"OMG it can’t be troooo that poverty-wage workers with low job security are more likely than secure middle-class-wage workers to steal from their employers!!! :eek: :eek: :eek: NOOOOO!!! :eek: :eek:
:mad: :mad: "Why, I absolutely REFUSE to accept that entirely unremarkable and commonplace economic fact!!! If you try to make me, then I’ll just get rid of ALL the workers altogether! :mad: :mad:
“After all, isn’t it preferable to completely demolish a valuable and self-supporting major institution of our society’s infrastructure than to tolerate the notion that it might be efficient and productive to pay some blue-collar workers a middle-class wage? Yes, that certainly is self-evident. Whew. I feel better now.”*
It’s fascinating how you can go on doggedly spouting the standard anti-government rhetoric even when the particular government institution you’re trying to draw an analogy with completely fails to support the comparison.
USPS mail clerks do not make $93K per year. USPS services do not cost triple what private-sector delivery services charge. For all your reiteration that you’re focusing on “reality”, you seem profoundly unconcerned with actual facts.
Sorry to intrude on your recitation of well-worn anti-government shibboleths with actual contemporary facts, but this is more of that stuff called reality. You know, the thing that you profess to have so much respect for but seem to know so little about.
Are you suggesting this has gone up because of the reasons put forth in the USA Today article? Do you have any evidence of this claim? The USPS release you cited credits “Postal Service actions to increase revenue” which is about as vague of a reason as I’ve ever seen. Do you have some proof of your claims as to the reason?
Even if this bump in the shipping and packaging part of the business does indicate the beginning of a longer term trend, it won’t save the Postal Service.
The losses in other areas dwarf this one shred of good news that you found.
Your own cite proves this is false. Again, according to the USPS on their own press release:
Even when you don’t count the pension benefits that congress is insisting they actually provide funding for the numbers are still in the red.
You can post 1,000 smiley faces of mockery, but the fact remains that the UPS and FedEx workers aren’t stealing from their employers as you suggest the USPS workers would if we cut their precious union perks. Nor are any other number of workers who aren’t protected by public sector union perks and salaries.
These kind of thug-like threats really make unions and their supporters look classy. “Nice mail service you have here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
First of all: “Dick and Sharon’s LA Progressive”? Nice source you got there. It’s complete with broken links all over it when you start clicking on their cites and fact sheets.
There’s a lot of fluff on that page. Statements like this one:
“But the economic downturn is also forcing more professional, technical and administrative support workers to look for new ways to build power”
Just translate to them thinking happy thoughts since they aren’t backed up with any facts.
Even the AFL-CIO admits that any trend is basically just demographics because we’ve lost so many blue collar jobs:
“The AFL-CIO is attributing this growth in recruits from the professional ranks primarily to the reduction of the manufacturing sector in the United States.”
So when they state this:
“white-collar union recruits is outpacing all other occupational groups, including the building and construction, hospitality and service sectors.”
This isn’t the result of desire on the part of workers, but simply the result of the decimation of the construction, hospitality and service sectors. The end result might be a slight uptick in white collar union members, but that hardly indicates that knowledge workers are going to start all turning union any time soon.
I for one feel sorry for someone who has a white collar job but got stuck at a union shop. That must be miserable.
It’s going exactly the way I expect on the SDMB. 20 to 1 odds. Personal attacks. Posters combing through my posts searching for one sentence they can pull out of context to mock me with.
I’m a unashamed conservative. It’s par for the course here.
Have seen some back and forth on the issue, but just to be clear - the USPS’s financial position has certainly been hindered from the prefunding pension requirement; however, excluding any pension costs, the USPS lost $2.2 billion in 2011 and is projected to lose $3.0 billion in 2012.
And I disagree with the point that USPS subsidizes UPS and FedEx by offering last mile delivery services. Given that USPS already provides door-to-door first class mail delivery, their incremental cost to deliver packages (of the sort handled by UPS and FedEx) is presumably very negligible, which is why they offer the service to UPS and FedEx in the first place (besides, they could always charge more for last-mile package delivery if they wanted to, since Congress doesn’t control their pricing on this service). While the cost of providing door-to-door first class mail delivery is quite high, the idea (in the days when mail was much more popular) was that USPS would be appropriately compensated for this service via its legal monopoly status (of course, that status is far less valuable today than it was 20+ years ago).
