Incredibly frustrating to get mail by USPS over the past couple months and even more frustrating to know this is an intentional kneecapping of the USPS by the administration in order "prove" government services are inefficient to privatize the USPS
They had more legislative leverage prior to 2018, so they could have done all this much earlier.
It is not possible to honestly discuss this in a meaningful way without acknowledging it's 3 months out from a presidential election. It the closest thing they can legally do to suppress voting turnout, and it's a deliberate strategy to win the election by reducing the franchise.
This isn't in a vacuum either, it's a coordinated part of a national legislative strategy (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/exposin...). It is coordinated across at the state and federal levels, and across branches. You can see here with the intentional degrading of the USPS immediately prior to a national election, at a state level with polling place closures (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/so...) and photo id laws (https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...), and constellation of Republican judicial appointments coordinated with specially prepared and crafted legal challenges by Republican AGs and private parties at state and circuit levels.
This is how it's being done: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which is why non government employers stopped offering defined benefit pensions and other post employment benefits (OPEB) as they are simply not affordable.
Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future taxpayers’ money by underfunding defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare benefits.
That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too.
> Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future taxpayers’ money by underfunding defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare benefits.
Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies. State and local run organizations have no such competition thus 'locally too big to fail'.
I've heard of some interesting talk about making a working USPS federal credit union/bank for a variety of services to the public that might prove lucrative and something that would potentially ease USPSs cash troubles. I'm not an expert into the economics about that and it might prove disruptive to a lot of businesses.
I don’t know what this means.
>Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies.
FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS. It’s only government entities that aren’t regulated (because politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected).
Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.
No they FedEx and UPS were required to prefund pensions in the 1970s, but they were given 40 years in which to do it.
USPS was given 10 years. In addition USPS was required to prefund retirement medical benefits, and unlike a private company who can cut retirement medical benefits at any time, USPS requires an act of congress to cut retirement medical benefits.
Furthermore, when calculating how much they need to set aside for retirement medical benefits, USPS can only use a much lower interest rate than private companies are allowed to use because they are forced to invest only in T-bills.
Also, I find it ridiculous that retirement medical benefits can just be cut anytime, as they are part of the compensation agreement. It's just a fluke of the law that it was never enshrined like defined benefit pensions were.
I don't see where the USPS is required to use T-bill rates to value liabilities in the tex of the PAEA law:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407/text
>who shall hold membership in the American Academy of Actuaries and shall be qualified in the evaluation of pension obligations, to conduct a review in accordance with generally accepted actuarial practices and principles and to provide a report to the Commission containing the results of the review.
As to investing look at page 35-36. It’s not literally just T-bills, but treasury holdings with very low interest rates compared to the kinds of investments private companies are allowed to make.
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/10k-reports/fy2...
That means expanding these requirements to other departments will need sigificant political backing and will be very unpopular. I do view benefit funding requirements as necessary.
> politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected
looks like you agree with me on that.
> Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.
That is an entirely different discussion that would garner my interest.
No, that really is the problem. Prefunding pension liabilities is something that literally no company or federal agency ever does, for obvious reasons.
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...
> Although accounting rules require the postal service to calculate future liabilities, including those for projected future employees, the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees
And no, no private entity in the US is required to prefund retiree health benefits.
What should they do that neither involves setting sufficient money aside today nor a significant chance of failing to fulfill their obligation?
Keep in mind that USPS' core business can't turn much of a profit due to Congressionally-defined price caps, so it is a very poor place to "invest" money.
Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.
If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.
As a consequence, it'll take a lot more than one term to undo everything that Trump has done in one term, and the way things were before Trump wasn't really peachy either.
One Trump term is going to require at least a decade to undo, and that's if it remains at just one term. Now add climate change on top of that and the future looks pretty grim.
But that climate, the white collar criminality, the nation wide rampant electoral schemes, the inequality haven't changed. What gave birth to Trump winning the 2016 election is still there. If I understand correctly, there's no reason republicans would support a democrat president trying to salvage thing considering they didn't prevent the swift acceleration in deterioration during the last four years.
Maybe Trump was an unknown as far as the governance he would provide but it was known what kind of individual he was (and to an extent what would happen if elected, in broad lines).
I don't know, I am in the final chapter of Sarah Kendzior "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America" and things do look grim indeed.
Absolutely nothing prevents that from happening again. The economic, social, and political forces that disadvantaged large swathes of the public, riling them up enough to make them take a chance on Trump, are all still there. If anything, the fact that the COVID-19 recession is likely going to hit full force during the next administration and make their situation even worse makes voting for demagogues even _more_ likely. Biden isn't going to be able to wave a magic wand to fix the world even if he wins, which is not a given.
We're in for a bumpy ride.
This is so absurdly dramatic. Just about everything is back open and ppl agree that wearing a mask basically removes all risk. If ppl want to vote, they can get off their ass and go vote.
And from a security standpoint, how can you say this with a straight face? Some of the hardest modern struggles in the tech industry revolve around security...and you're over here acting like mailing in paper ballots, with no authentication/encryption/verification is a secure practice. All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results. Look up cognitive dissonance, I think it's hitting you hard here.
It's funny you open your reply about "absurdly dramatic" then lay an equally absurd claim about vote-by-mail having a problem with fraud.
Your reply also conveniently ignores the historical pattern of voter suppression coming from the Republican party.
It seems in America, some constitutional rights are more protected than others.
I'd worry a lot more about computerized election systems before voting by mail. I think people are too worried about individual votes/errors. 0.0x% of ballots being lost/not counted/etc. is a problem with any election system ("hanging chads", signatures not matching well, ...), not just voting by mail. The question should be how hard is it to pull off a large scale disruption/fraud without being detected.
Most elections aren't close enough for the outcome to be swung by the kind of paper ballot fraud that a single person is capable of committing. Unlike electronic hacks, paper ballot fraud doesn't scale.
Meanwhile, rigged voting machines that flip votes have been caught on camera countless times. Zero effort has been made to do anything about that.
since trump lost the popular vote in 2016, isnt your grand republican conspiracy both categorically false and totally meaningless if it werent?
Do you really believe that someone winning in the previous election is a guarantee that they would not try to suppress the vote in the current or future elections? If not, what point were you trying to make by bringing up the results of the 2016 election?
> The R Street Institute, a think tank dedicated to free markets and limited government, recently released a study titled “Why conservatives should embrace sensible measures to expand absentee balloting.”
> The study cast doubt on claims that Democrats benefit from expanded mail-in voting, pointing to three states Trump carried in 2016 — Utah, Arizona and Montana — where about 70 percent of voters cast ballots through the mail.
GOP leadership is just totally unhinged.
You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans.
You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).
I cannot believe that no one foresaw an election in a pandemic and said, “let’s build an app for this”
With a defined contribution plan, the employer is off the hook immediately after giving the employee the cash.
With defined benefit, the employer is on the hook for all adverse investment performance as well as broader economic turmoil decades into the future.
The whole deferred compensation scheme known as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare morphed into a way for politicians to push payroll expenses into the future so that they could get elected on "low tax" platforms. They can get away with this because the laws requiring saving for deferred compensation don't apply to government entities.
Technically that shouldn't matter. It's a government service and if postage doesnt cover the cost the federal government should.
But I'd be happy to see first class mail stop subsidising other stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...
The correct link appears to be:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/politics/postmaster-ge...
I haven't followed any of this story and this is the first time I'm reading up on it, but why would this increase the chances of Trump winning? Wouldn't restricting mail-in voting affect both sides roughly equally? That's what I would expect, anyway, but perhaps I'm missing something?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/postal-compromise-close-as-u...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-postal-service-cha...
If they wanted to privatize it, they could have don’t it at any time during the past four years.
Yes it is.
> it’s about disrupting their ability to process mail in ballots for the election.
True, but those are complementary not mutually exclsuive motivations.
I don't think either of those motivations is okay, in fact, I think the action being taken on either basis alone would be, and a fortiori them being taken with both motivations is, a serious abuse of executive power.
I don't play along with excuses. As I said, if it was really about that, they had numerous opportunities in the past four years.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-reaches-1-million-w...
[1]: Which the USPS is not, but let's be flexible with the term.
I do tend to think the USPS should be allowed to increase their rates to sustainable levels. Individuals are not nearly as dependent on being able to regularly send letters across the country for well under a dollar as they once were.
Because letters are paper but so are magazines, newspapers, etc that I know are delivered by non-USPS mail carriers.
It isn't a very persuasive argument to destroy cheap post for the masses to... let investors make money. As it is if usps was incapable of fulfilling its duty private entities could enter the market at way higher prices and if useful would see business.
I just learned this, but yes, that appears to be the case! The private express statutes[1] appear to do just that.
In 1971 a private corporation, the Independent Postal System of America, offered to deliver Christmas cards for five cents each — three cents less than the U.S.P.S. rate. They were stopped by a court injunction.
In 1966 the CF&I Steel Corporation, frustrated by the quality of postal service between their Denver headquarters and their plant in Pueblo, hired an armored-car service to deliver the mail. After five months of operation the service was halted by the Denver Post Office, and "at the Post Office’s suggestion" CF&I paid two thousand dollars toward back postage..
First class mail is a "monopoly" as someone downthread noted, but not the kind that anyone trying to make a profit would want. The post office cannot set prices on first class mail (that's done by Congress) and needs to deliver mail everywhere at the price Congress has mandated, even when it is done at a loss.