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Well, here's a bit of good news on good government Democrats did the Republicans didn't block

Craig234

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For years, I've had to talk about how Republicans attacked the Postal Service, sneaking in a law that made them pre-fund healthcare for the next 75 years, gutting their budget. It seems they have a big union, Republicans don't like unions or public services, and do like the private competitors and their donations, so let's kill the Post Office.

Finally, Democrats pushed a bill to fix these things, removing that requirement - it will free $50 billion for the Post Office over a decade - and for whatever reasons, most Republicans voted for it and it's about to be signed. Some good news.
 
For years, I've had to talk about how Republicans attacked the Postal Service, sneaking in a law that made them pre-fund healthcare for the next 75 years, gutting their budget. It seems they have a big union, Republicans don't like unions or public services, and do like the private competitors and their donations, so let's kill the Post Office.

Finally, Democrats pushed a bill to fix these things, removing that requirement - it will free $50 billion for the Post Office over a decade - and for whatever reasons, most Republicans voted for it and it's about to be signed. Some good news.
Sounds like a real winner so far. All we need now is to hear that DeJoy has been sent packing. I then will have my faith restored in the USPS.
 
For years, I've had to talk about how Republicans attacked the Postal Service, sneaking in a law that made them pre-fund healthcare for the next 75 years, gutting their budget. It seems they have a big union, Republicans don't like unions or public services, and do like the private competitors and their donations, so let's kill the Post Office.

Finally, Democrats pushed a bill to fix these things, removing that requirement - it will free $50 billion for the Post Office over a decade - and for whatever reasons, most Republicans voted for it and it's about to be signed. Some good news.
sigh .. your premise is absolutely false ...

The Government Accountability Office published a report in 2012 discussing the financial status of the Post Office and made recommendations on alternative approaches to fund retiree health benefits. What's factually incorrect is the funding of retiree benefits was collected over the 10 year period. In reality, it is a much broader window: For the first 10 years, fixed payments amounts were collected to cover current retirees and the projected liability for current employees with a followup in 2017 to develop a 40-year amortization schedule. It's a myth that 75 years of retiree benefits were collected in the first 10 years.

Please .. stop with the Democrat talking points ...
 
This is gonna definitely piss off a bunch of the insurrection supporters and all the anti-America folks.
 
For years, I've had to talk about how Republicans attacked the Postal Service, sneaking in a law that made them pre-fund healthcare for the next 75 years, gutting their budget. It seems they have a big union, Republicans don't like unions or public services, and do like the private competitors and their donations, so let's kill the Post Office.

Finally, Democrats pushed a bill to fix these things, removing that requirement - it will free $50 billion for the Post Office over a decade - and for whatever reasons, most Republicans voted for it and it's about to be signed. Some good news.
When it is signed into law and DeJoy has been thrown out I will give it a standing ovation.
 
sigh .. your premise is absolutely false ...

The Government Accountability Office published a report in 2012 discussing the financial status of the Post Office and made recommendations on alternative approaches to fund retiree health benefits. What's factually incorrect is the funding of retiree benefits was collected over the 10 year period. In reality, it is a much broader window: For the first 10 years, fixed payments amounts were collected to cover current retirees and the projected liability for current employees with a followup in 2017 to develop a 40-year amortization schedule. It's a myth that 75 years of retiree benefits were collected in the first 10 years.

Please .. stop with the Democrat talking points ...
nonsense ........
 
nonsense ........
reality ..

This is the Status, Financial Outlook, and Alternative Approaches to Fund Retiree Health Benefits - Government Accountability Office ... I trust this source over your opinion:

Page 2: Findings

The Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund (PSRHBF) covered about 49
percent of the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) $94 billion retiree health benefit
liability at fiscal year-end 2012. USPS’s deteriorating financial outlook, however,
will make it difficult to continue the current prefunding schedule in the short term,
and possibly to fully fund the remaining $48 billion unfunded liability over the
remaining 44 years of the schedule on which the 2006 Postal Accountability and
Enhancement Act (PAEA) was based. The liability covers the projected benefits
for about 471,000 current postal retirees and a portion of the projected benefits
for about 528,000 current employees; it does not cover employees not yet hired.
Under PAEA, USPS is responsible for contributing an additional $33.9 billion to
the PSRHBF by fiscal year 2017, including the $11.1 billion USPS has defaulted
on over the past 2 years. PAEA also requires the Office of Personnel
Management (OPM) to calculate the remaining unfunded liability in 2017 and
develop an initial 40-year amortization payment schedule. USPS, however,
projects further declines in mail volume and revenues that may continue to limit
its ability to prefund the remaining retiree health benefit liability.
Click to expand...

Page 13: Background

Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders,
PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits
over a 10-year period. Rather, pursuant to OPM’s methodology, such
payments would be projected to fund the liability over a period in excess
of 50 years, from 2007 through 2056 and beyond (with rolling 15-year
amortization periods after 2041). However, the payments required by
PAEA were significantly “frontloaded,” with the fixed payment amounts in
the first 10 years exceeding what actuarially determined amounts would
have been using a 50-year amortization schedule.
Click to expand...
 
Fixing the sabotage of the USPS is nuts-and-bolts good government stuff. The kinds of thing the nation misses most when the GOP is in power but doesn’t even know it.
 

Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006.

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."

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."

In fact, it gets worse. The PAEA also required the Postal Service to invest its retiree funds exclusively in government bonds. Once again, this is a rather unusual practice. While it mitigates risk, it's also a great way to earn really low returns.

Then the USPS has to set aside even more money to achieve the same benefit level. Baker calculated that just getting rid of this requirement could make the Postal Service profitable again.

Now, in a sane world, the USPS would be treated as a universal public good: Everyone would understand that it provides the bedrock delivery service to poorer and farflung areas that private carriers won't bother with because doing so isn't profitable. Instead, the Postal Service is expected to compete with the private market, and fund all of its costs out of its own revenue, without subsidies from the rest of government.

That's bad enough. But it's downright perverse to add extra handicaps that a private competitor like FedEx would never impose on itself.

Maybe that was just dumb politics. But it looks an awful lot like deliberate sabotage of a perfectly good public institution. It turns out Trump's task force will include Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. The latter in particular is a conservative small-government ideologue.

It doesn't seem too crazy to think they'll recommend privatizing the USPS and selling it off for parts. And that they'll justify this recommendation by claiming the Postal Service just can't seem to compete.
 
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