Where Else Would They Go?
link Losses are getting steeper for U.S. Postal Service – Nov. 12, 2010.
Of all the sacred cows out there, the Post Office has to be the most holy. According to this article, 8.5 billion dollars was lost by the operation over the past year despite job cuts and austerity measures. What this really means is that US citizens spent 280 dollars per man, woman and child over the past year in order to keep them in business. In the big scheme of things, this isn’t a lot of money when you consider the alternative; that would be having all the postal workers unemployed. The estimated number of actual carriers is about 350,000 as of 2008, but there’s probably another half of that amount in administration. If they all got laid off, there would be all sorts of unexpected consequences.
For example, the short pants business would take a huge hit. It can probably be verified that posties are responsible for 80% of the consumption of short walking pants in the nation. What about black shoes? Same thing. We would see a drastic decline in the use of dog repellent as well as dog snacks. The incidences of lonely spouses signing on to chat websites will spike as the daily mailperson would no longer make the daily rounds. At least for 280 dollars per year, the gang are employed and the country gets some kind of service. Plus, where else would people go to vent their anger? So a family of 4 would supplement the jobs of posties at just under $1200 per year, not including stamps. In this day of $5 cups of coffee and million dollar bungalows, I suppose it’s not a big deal.
But if you think about what usually gets delivered in your mail, I think the conclusion would be the same as mine. It’s mainly junk. Bills are moving more and more to the online payment scheme. Love notes are sent with pics now on chatrooms.com. The only things you receive in the mail anymore are flyers for supermarket sales, real estate solicitations and the odd summons for jury duty or legal demands for more child support. In essence, the public is subsidizing advertising to their homes. When we toss flyers directly into the recycle bin, it is the same thing as tossing dollar bills there.
The amusing part of this article is this comment:
“…The Postal Service blamed the deeper losses on the recession and on the continuing growth of e-mail…”
Email huh. That’s probably a temporary thing. Looking a bit closer, we can see one of the main sources of the funding shortfall. It turns out that the Post Office has a unique constraint:
“…its “unique” requirement to pre-fund its retirement fund — something no other federal agency is required to do…”
In the upcoming year, this amount is almost 6 billion dollars and auditors Ernst and Young are doubting the ability to pay. As has been previously discussed, the entitlements and promises of many public sector employees will come under increasing pressure to be re-negotiated as the obligations get bigger and the pay-ins get smaller. At least in this case, it appears to be somewhat on track.
This is still small change compared to the potential savings from a genuinely useless apparatus, the TSA. That costs up to $58 billion a year… Hmm…