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Comment by mijkal | Hacker News Reader

It's an artificial deficit that Congress created.

The postal service is one of the few gov't agencies explicitly created in the Constitution; it's vital to national cohesion and commerce (especially rural areas).

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You're right that the deficit is mostly artificial, but since this has come up a lot recently it's important to point out that the USPS as an entity is not enshrined in the constitution. The postal clause says:

> The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads

And that's it. The rest is left up to Congress to figure out; they could, if they chose, punt entirely and allow eg FedEx to run post offices. I think the USPS is vitally important, and we can make arguments for its role as a public good without being hyperbolic about it.

In FY 2019 the USPS lost $3.4 billion excluding all Congressionally mandated expenditures[1]. In 2018 they lost almost $2 billion, also excluding mandatory expenditures. The USPS's precarious financial situation is not artificial, it's the result of a long term decline in mail volume as correspondence increasingly shifts to electronic systems.

A nit: The postal service wasn't actually created in the Constitution. Congress is merely authorized to do so.

[1] https://about.usps.com/what/financials/10k-reports/fy2019.pd... Page 18, labeled "Controllable loss".

The artificial nature of the USPS's debt comes from the fact that congress passed an (unusual) requirement to make it prepay health & retirement benefits.

"The debt it carried jumped from $7 billion in 2008 to $10 billion in 2009. At the end of 2019, the GAO calculated that the Postal Service had $160.9 billion in debt, $119.3 billion of which came from retiree benefits" https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-se...

I can't access the article, but don't postal employees get the same (unsustainable) retirement benefits as government employees? Of course the costs of those benefits are ballooning. The retirement age is far earlier than life expectancy; it's simple math. What alternative is proposed that would make it past a union sitting on 120B in benefit commitments already?

> I can't access the article, but don't postal employees get the same (unsustainable) retirement benefits as government employees?

Can you clarify? My understanding is that US Federal Employee retirement benefits (for new employees) have been comparable to private sector benefits since some point in the 80s, though existing employees at that time kept their old, more generous pension plan.

I think this might be what I'm talking about: https://www.opm.gov/retirement-services/fers-information/

It is not necessarily that the retirement benefits are so extreme, it is that the Post Office singularly has a requirement to pre-fund its retirement fund massively in advance. No other agency is required to do so.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2020/02/hous...

The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act has pretty much been at the core of why the USPS has had such extreme woes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...

Unless you think the money to pay pensions will magically materialize out of thin air in the future, I don't see what's artificial about it. They have obligations to pay and recognize them.

>> The artificial nature of the USPS's debt comes from the fact that congress passed an (unusual) requirement to make it prepay health & retirement benefits.

> Unless you think the money to pay pensions will magically materialize out of thin air in the future, I don't see what's artificial about it. They have obligations to pay and recognize them.

My understanding is every other entity that has similar obligations is allowed to pay them as they go.

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