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Comment by fr0sty | Hacker News Reader

> the US Postal Service is being driven to bankrupcy by regulation as well

More correctly they are being driven to bankruptcy due to ballooning pension payments (and a congressional mandate to actually fund those obligations).

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The post office, alone of any government entity, must pre-fund pensions of persons not yet born. Congress is also pretending that the Post Office must be a self-sufficient organization. This is despite the fact that running the post office is a Constitutional requirement, profitable or no.

Running a post office is not a Constitutional requirement. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 states, "The Congress shall have Power To establish Post Offices and post roads."[1] This is not a requirement to do so. In fact, if you look at the case law behind this clause, in the beginning many questioned if the clause even gave Congress the authority to establish a federal post office or merely regulate the establishment of third party post offices.

[1] http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-1/39-post-offi...

I think the real problem is that they were given a lucrative monopoly (mail delivery) and in return were required to provide universal service. But the internet made mail delivery much more expensive, while the costs of universal service have remained constant.

Which all goes to show that if the legislature wants to create a public good they should have the guts to raise taxes to pay for it, rather than trying to be clever and accomplish their aims through the back door.

USPS is expected to remain profitable as a commercial business, but to some extent is still treated as though they were part of the federal government. Their ability to make tough business decisions when they need to is crippled by a slow, ineffectual congress which refuses to allow that. I think the lesson here is that you can't have it both ways.

If USPS were allowed to make their own decisions, they wouldn't necessarily be in this mess.

Its true that USPS is facing changes due to the increase of package delivery and the decline of normal mail delivery, but that is not the current source of their crisis. As OP points out, funding future pension obligations plus the increasing costs of pensions in general is what is killing USPS right now.

To fund them way ahead of a reasonable schedule actually.

And that is just fine. If every government agency had this "feature" we'd have half the government we have today. Politicians need to feel the pain of paying for their delusionary spending ahead of the need in order to ensure that they don't spend what we don't have or what we can't afford. What a concept: Want a new program? Save the money you'll need for the first five years of operation and then we can talk about it. Programs have been rolled out with no runway whatsoever and counting on sucking more money out of taxpayers to cover the holes. If the post office didn't have to face the reality of funding these insanely ridiculous government pensions my kids and their kids and maybe one more generation after that would have to pay taxes to provide postal workers with nearly a full salary for the rest of their lives. That would be wrong.

No business would be run like this, you fund your pensions over 30 years, not 10. The USPS is failing right now simply because that's what the republicans want, it's purely political. The tea partiers are having their to at destroying the economy.

Most libertarians dont get economics very well, they just think taxes and government are evil. Capital is not something you can save in a silo or go negative. It just flows to where it's most needed at any given time; you see it has to be spent, saving fiat currency is just a way of moving it (if you save, someone ELSE must go into debt at the same time).

Now what does economy of our kids look like? It solely depends on what they produce and consume! But that also depends on how we spent the money in the past invest in the future. Education, infrastructure, R&D, ... Didn't invest? Well your kids will suffer. Oh, china had money burning a whole in its pocket and you decided to let them inflate rather than take the money at a negative interest rate? WTF are you an idiot?

Now what are pensions? They are simply investments for the future! But you have to pace those investments and time them just right, so you don't kill yourself now and can meet obligations in the future.

The real problem that will hit us in the ass: most of us aren't covered by pensions at all and we are finding out that 401k's aren't a great alternative. That will be a bigger burden for your kids (assuming they don't abondon you) than any kind of debt they have to pay off for us (really, they are probably just paying you anyways).

I can't tell whether this is satire or not.

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