Saturday, September 28, 2013
Some Senators still trying to destroy the Post Office.
And it is no surprise that the Senate's Own Dr. No, Tom Coburn is one of them. Sadly, a Democrat, Tom Carper of Delaware is another. They have co-sponsored a bill that pretends to reform the Post Office while, in fact damaging it even more.
“Dr. Coburn and I believe that our bipartisan bill provides a road map to enable the Postal Service to return to profitability, not just in the near term, but to remain there in the long term,” Carper said. “If that happens, the rate request will go away. If it doesn’t happen, the rate request is there staring us and the Postal Service in the face.”The real culprit for the USPS losses has been the outrageous and deliberately destructive pension funding requirements imposed by the Republicans in 2006.
Among other things, the legislation would save the Postal Service money by modifying health care benefits and pensions for postal workers. It also would change postal delivery options, including the eventual discontinuation of Saturday delivery. Other measures would require centralized or curbside delivery for new addresses and the option for existing addresses to convert from door delivery to centralized or curbside delivery.
Rolando and John F. Hegarty, the president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union, instead attributed the Postal Service’s financial difficulties to a 2006 congressional mandate that changed the way the service funded its pensions. The change required the Postal Service to fund future retirees’ health benefits for the next 75 years within 10 years.But will Dr. No and his Blue Dog buddy repeal that outrageous requirement and return the USPS to normal requirements followed by business? Fat chance!
For fiscal 2013, the mandate requires the Postal Service to pay $5.5 billion, which it lacks the money to do. The legislation that Carper and Coburn proposed would decrease the size of the annual payments by extending the 10-year time frame to 40 years.Noble purposes my ass! If the USPS had ever reached that impossible goal, the Republican/Teabagger rats bastards would have begun working to allow their Wall St. owners to loot the funds as they are doing with every other available pension plan.
“The payment schedule was put into place for a noble purpose about seven years ago,” Carper said.
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