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If they want to set prices themselves then let them, but remove their monopoly on letters. Repeal the private express statutes. That seems quite fair.

> If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does

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.

Banking from the post office is a pretty common thing and makes a lot of sense as it gives people a public, non-profit banking avenue for the poor and under served.

I would agree if there were more post offices, but the USPS has been closing them over the last twenty years to cut costs. They serve wide geographic areas and it is easier to find a local credit union than a post office these days. The poor would be better served with Internet banking.

Many people do not have reliable internet access.

Perhaps a potential USPS credit union would disrupt payday loans.

> That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too.

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.

>FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS.

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.

I agree the exact terms of funding requirements (10 years) for USPS were politically motivated to weaken it, but the philosophy of funding accrued benefits is sound, and it was long overdue. The same should be required of all entities issuing defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare.

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.

It's another good idea in theory, but the implementation is being controlled and kneecapped by a party/administration that wants it dead, while throwing up their hands and saying "not our faults". A good idea with a bad implementation is in the end just another bad implementation, forget every word before "bad". Good intentions were claimed but they have no basis in fact. The GOP as a whole is corrupt to its core.

The philosophy being sound is worthless if the execution is flawed.

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...

Interesting, I would like to see the reasoning for why its all just treasury holdings. I don't see anything in the law that would mandate it.

> I don’t know what this means.

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.

>> Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem.

No, that really is the problem. Prefunding pension liabilities is something that literally no company or federal agency ever does, for obvious reasons.

I don’t know what this “prefunding” word means, but the USPS was only required to save for accrued benefits. Which every non governmental entity is required to do in the US due to ERISA and PPA 2006.

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

The point is that on the day that the USPS hires a 20-year-old employee they immediately need to set aside money for this worker's healthcare at age 90, which is an astronomical sum (as projections of future healthcare costs are inevitably astronomical).

And no, no private entity in the US is required to prefund retiree health benefits.

Let's say USPS has promised to pay for a 20-year-old employee's health care for the next 70 years. Let's say the total price of that health care is going to be $10M over the 70-year course.

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.

Which goes to show how ridiculous it is to offer retiree healthcare benefits. If the cost is so high as to be described as astronomical, then why is the government offering it?

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

If voting is effectively curtailed, everything else is moot. This election is a referendum on (American) democracy.

Hmm. Wasn't that referendum settled in 2016 ? Trump is 30 years in the making.

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.

No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide.

If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.

Democrats like to play nice ("by the rules"), Republicans (and Trump in particular) do not.

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.

> No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide.

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.

> "Trump at that time was a 'why the fuck not' to people who hated the current climate and wanted 'change'."

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.

If voting is effectively curtailed, can it really be called a referendum?

> by preventing members of the other party from voting

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.

You will need to find some evidence of voter fraud for mail in ballots. Many states have it as an option and it hasn't happened. The military regularly votes by mail and it hasn't happened.

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.

But the military I think we can trust more than the Postal Service, every time we hear of a postal employee destroying or throwing away mail should be a significant enough reason that the agency is simply not ready to take this on. Maybe at the next election, maybe with a significantly more funding, transparency, and security, but not now. Mail in voting would be great, but not now. It’s far too dangerous.

Tell that to people that live in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, or (mostly) Utah. They've been voting by mail for years.

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.

Your own current president always votes by mail. If it’s fine for him why on Earth do you think that it’s not fine for everyone else?

The coronavirus has been recognized as an issue since before March. The only reason why there is not better safeguards in place for vote by mail is because the ruling party does not want it to happen.

The fact that you're not familiar with the ballot authentication and verification mechanisms used in mail-in voting suggests a starting point for your research.

> All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results.

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.

Several states have had mail-in voting for years. It only became a political issue a few months ago, and only amongst one party.

Meanwhile, rigged voting machines that flip votes have been caught on camera countless times. Zero effort has been made to do anything about that.

> the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

since trump lost the popular vote in 2016, isnt your grand republican conspiracy both categorically false and totally meaningless if it werent?

How would a vote 4 years ago invalidate the very real and observable means of voter suppression we see today?

Because he had less votes and won, so im not sure what this alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish.

I'm pretty sure the alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish a second term for Donald Trump as well as picking up some seats in both the Senate and House for his party.

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?

How are dems more likely to vote by mail? And what are the percentages for each party?

Dems are more likely to be affected by polling station closures and consolidation, so that e.g. all of Detroit has to vote in a single location.

They are not. Republican leadership is convinced they are but consider this quote from https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510040-gop-fears-trump... :

> 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.

Most large urban areas are Democratic. In the time of COVID, would you rather vote by mail or wait in line at overcrowded voting locations?

Short answer is the effect should be even overall, but what matters happens at state and district levels, so you could even disenfranchise more people of your own party on the net and still end up with an improved electoral outcome.

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).

The idea that we would be voting in 2020 by mail is crazy.

I cannot believe that no one foresaw an election in a pandemic and said, “let’s build an app for this”

I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty in automating this. This has been proposed for decades and there is published academic research about the extraordinary difficulty of ensuring the integrity of the voters and the tallies. You can look at literature on the challenges with REAL ID implementation or Healthcare.gov for similar and smaller projects.

Extremely relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/

Trying to ELI5 this to myself - USPS has to fund their pensions and is forced to keep money aside for it. They are unable to make price increases to account for all this extra money that they have to keep aside since they are a public service. Their competitors UPS, FedEx are not being held to the same standard, and so USPS is losing out? And this makes a convenient excuse to show USPS as a failed org?

The same tactics (let's call a spade a spade) is used in my home country to legitimize the end of our political regime.

Not only that, but UPS and FedEx probably don’t offer pensions at all. USPS will never be able to compete, even if they raised their prices.

I am sure they both offer define contribution pensions like almost all companies do.

In the US, pensions means defined benefit pensions, which cost a great amount more than defined contribution pensions.

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.

Almost. Non government entities don't offer the kind of unaffordable benefits such as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare anyway as they became more and more unaffordable.

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.

"Defined benefit" should be replaced with either "100% guaranteed returns" or "tax backed" in order to raise the red flags it should.

>> The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses

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.

A lot of the other stuff subsidizes first class mail whose volume has dropped enormously. The USPS also still has to maintain post offices that have very low volumes.

Inflation adjusted first class postage rate, 1885-present.

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

Exactly. I don’t understand why sending a letter isn’t $5. We’d get less junk, and you could still do if you really wanted / needed to.