Should we shut down the US Postal Service?
Email has destroyed its business model, and even deep cuts in personnel and facilities might not be enough to save it.
By doubleace on Fri, Aug 12, 2011 1:25 PM
This post comes from Lynn Mucken at MSN Money.
Back in May, I declared that the U.S. Post Service, a treasured American delivery vehicle in one form or another since 1775, had outlived its usefulness, a victim of email and its own bloated financial structure. I also wrote:
Another thing that is not going to happen is the prompt and thrifty dissolution of the U.S. Postal Service as we know it. There are just too many jobs -- the Postal Service has 563,000 employees -- and a shrinking but still vocal group of holdouts who insist they do not need a computer.
For them, we will waste years and billions, maybe trillions, of dollars on a barely breathing product.
It was no surprise, then, to see that Congress, apparently not wearied by doing almost nothing to address the national debt problem, has offered two plans to solve the Postal Service's deficit, which is $20 billion over the past four years, including $8.5 billion in the past fiscal year. The bipartisan plan kicks the can down the road for future elected officials to worry about. The conservative plan would solve the problem by, among other things, repainting the trucks.
What was surprising was the proposal put forth by the Postal Service brass themselves: cut jobs, close post offices and withdraw from the federal health care and pension programs that they say do not meet "the private-sector comparability standard."
This is no small stuff.
According to The Washington Post, citing a notice sent to employees, the Postal Service wants to cut its current work force of 563,000 by 220,000 over the next four years. About 100,000 cuts would come from attrition, the rest by elimination.
Email has destroyed its business model, and even deep cuts in personnel and facilities might not be enough to save it.
By doubleace on Fri, Aug 12, 2011 1:25 PM
This post comes from Lynn Mucken at MSN Money.
Back in May, I declared that the U.S. Post Service, a treasured American delivery vehicle in one form or another since 1775, had outlived its usefulness, a victim of email and its own bloated financial structure. I also wrote:
Another thing that is not going to happen is the prompt and thrifty dissolution of the U.S. Postal Service as we know it. There are just too many jobs -- the Postal Service has 563,000 employees -- and a shrinking but still vocal group of holdouts who insist they do not need a computer.
For them, we will waste years and billions, maybe trillions, of dollars on a barely breathing product.
It was no surprise, then, to see that Congress, apparently not wearied by doing almost nothing to address the national debt problem, has offered two plans to solve the Postal Service's deficit, which is $20 billion over the past four years, including $8.5 billion in the past fiscal year. The bipartisan plan kicks the can down the road for future elected officials to worry about. The conservative plan would solve the problem by, among other things, repainting the trucks.
What was surprising was the proposal put forth by the Postal Service brass themselves: cut jobs, close post offices and withdraw from the federal health care and pension programs that they say do not meet "the private-sector comparability standard."
This is no small stuff.
According to The Washington Post, citing a notice sent to employees, the Postal Service wants to cut its current work force of 563,000 by 220,000 over the next four years. About 100,000 cuts would come from attrition, the rest by elimination.
Grow up boy.
