Postal Service Delivers Red Ink
by Big Dog on Nov 13, 2010 at 23:59 Political
The United States Postal Service is a bloated government agency that has many more employees than it needs and has more overhead than revenue it generates and that is because it is not generating revenue. The Postal Service announced that its lost $8.5 BILLION for the fiscal year. This is nothing new as the Postal Service has been losing money for a long time.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is amazing that they can get a letter from one side of the country to the other in a few days for under 50 cents. But the manner in which they do it consumes a lot of money and since this is a government agency there is no urgency to correct that problem.
The Postal Service indicated that it has saved money over the last two years by cutting 105,000 jobs. It cut that many and still has a huge number of employees and these employees earn good money and have great benefits. All of this has to be paid for and if the Postal Service is not making money then it comes from the taxpayer.
So why don’t we privatize the Postal Service? The Constitution says that Congress will establish post offices and postal roads. I think we are pretty much past needing postal roads (since all roads are probably postal roads) and I am sure that there is no restriction on making the post office a private entity. Seems that doing so would still meet the requirement of establishing post offices. A private company could run things for profit and take the bloat out of the system.
Since that will never happen there are other things they can do. They should cut down to 5 days of delivery and shut down the Post Offices on Saturday. The number of post offices should be reviewed and they should either eliminate or combine them. There are two post offices within a few miles of each other in my area. That is not necessary.
Then they need to cut more people from the workforce. There are way too many people for the number of items being delivered. The people in charge need to take a serious look at the number of postal employees and cut out those not needed. This might be an easier task if they first close the unnecessary offices.
The last thing they need to do is restructure the employee benefits. Postal workers pay only a fraction of what most other government employees pay each year for health insurance.
With an appropriate number of workers, restructured benefits and the elimination or combining of offices the Postal Service might be able to stop delivering red ink every fiscal year.
Cave Canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
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Tags: losses, postal service, waste