If America wants to save some money, it should consider selling off the US Postal service. Aside from delivering junk mail and political flyers (more junk mail), its annual losses are doubling. USPS Buried an 8.8-billion-dollar loss in this year’s fiscal report.
That buys a lot of condoms or period products if that sort of thing inspires you. A few roads and bridges. Or quite a bit of border wall to keep the Fentanyl in Mexico. Heck, since this is all crazy talk, I bet the American people could do far more productive things with 8.8 billion than the US Postal Service.
Even for a scandal-plagued agency notorious for its egregious spending sprees, the hit to American taxpayers is substantial. Management attributes some of the year’s losses to a $5.4 billion increase in operating expenses driven largely by a spike in workers’ compensation obligations. Compensation and benefits expenses alone increased by $994 million due to contractual wage increases, the USPS reveals, and retirement benefits increased by $320 million “due largely to the higher amortization costs of unfunded benefits.” The agency figures also include a $323 million boost in transportation costs caused by “fuel prices and highway contract rates.” According to the USPS’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, Joseph Corbett, the agency “continued to make progress in the fiscal year in containing expenses that are under management’s control.”
We are left to assume that only Congress and the President can address expenses outside “management’s control.” Don’t expect any congress you can imagine addressing much of anything, even though any serious effort to cut waste fraud and abuse could make a name for itself digging in at Postal Service.
Judicial Watch has several examples at the link, so I won’t revisit them here. But it’s not an insurmountable problem. Give it away to whoever wants to run it, let them declare bankruptcy, and then restructure the whole damn thing. We’ll save 8 billion next year and billions in every following year.
No, probably not in my lifetime, but it sounds nice. A lot nicer than the annual declaration of hey, we lost x billions again this year. Happy Holidays!
