He has but one ball, and it's made of brass

Technically it doesn't get taxpayer funding, but the only thing that has kept it from going belly up are billions of dollars of loans from the treasury, which let's face it, it will never be able to pay back. Forget the fact that none of us get $15 billion lines of credit from the treasury, if we did, they'd impose some kind of lending standards on us -- not, "Take what you need whenever you need it. Pay it back whenever you can." We're all on the hook for that money if they never pay it back.

 

The postal service has a government-enforced monopoly on first class mail. I highly doubt that it is efficiently run. There is little incentive.

That 50 cent price tag isn't a reflection of any efficiency on the USPS's part. The USPS has been had losses in the billions of dollars each of the last several years. Clearly, they should be charging more for that letter. They could price fix a letter at 3 cents and rack up even bigger losses, and it wouldn't say anything about their operations. ... except that they have someone outright subsidizing their losses or providing indefinite loans, while they continue to lose money.

In terms of Lance Armstrong, that is probably where it gets tricky for them. They are saying he defrauded them. If they have to prove some kind of harm (do they?), I am sure what you said is the way this is heading -- he'd want them to have to open their books and show what their revenues from overnight delivery in Europe are, and how they were before and after their association with him. If there is no drop off as a result of him getting busted, common sense (again, I know that is never in play) tells me that their claim is going to be hard to prove.

 

Compete more effectively with who? Nobody is allowed to compete with the USPS by law.

Prior to that mandate you just posted about, the USPS handled retiree health benefits --promises it has made to its workers -- on a pay as you go basis. Current workers were paying for current retirees -- except for about a decade, the gap was narrowing because of demographics, people living longer and rising health care costs, which is where I would guess the idea for that mandate came from. That put the USPS in the same predicament as social security.

The cost of actually providing benefits to retirees was less than the value of benefits that current workers were accruing (you had a large cohort of baby boomers paying for a smaller cohort of retirees), so it means that the USPS was understating the costs of its retiree health care to avoid making sure it would be able to financially meet the promises it had made in the future.

With or without a mandate that forced them to prefund what they have promised in the future, let's say they were allowed to keep understating their costs by essentially borrowing from their future retirees to subsidize its losses. They'd still be in the red on an operating basis today. Instead of billions of dollars, it would be hundreds of millions. Which might sound good. But on top of it, they'd be in a situation where thousands of postal workers are going to be owed benefits they were promised, and there would be no way to meet that liability -- which would have been in the billions of dollars without prefunding it.

I suppose you can understate your problems with that kind of creative accounting, but unlike private businesses that rob their pension funds or healthcare funds to deal with their struggling businesses, and then let a bankruptcy judge decide how much of a haircut the retirees are going to have to take, we all know that there would have been extreme pressure to make good on what those retirees were promised. When the USPS couldn't meet their promises, because they never established a fund, who was going to pay?

 

That kind of relativism doesn't change reality. Any private business or government agency (although, unlike the USPS, most government agencies were not set up to be self supporting) that operates that way is a running a sham.

Which is worse, robbing your workers of money promised them in the future to avoid dealing with an operating problem today, or actually dealing with your current problems?

Unless the plan was to make future promises to your workers (presumably negotiated in lieu of wages), and rather than make good on those promises, use those workers money to cover current operating expenses. Which would be pretty shitty.

The USPS can certainly bleed to a SLOWER death if it steals from its workers that way to fund its current operations. Whatever you think about the politics behind the funding mandate (which is a dumb sideshow to me that avoids talking about the USPS itself), that is the same as a business that robs a pension fund (or worse, never even funded it) to put off bankruptcy. Whatever benefit the business owners get from staving off that bankruptcy, it still leaves the future problem of the billions of dollars that were promised in the not-too-far future and were used for something else.

 

Required? I don't know about that.

But there are plenty that CHOOSE to do it, because when they negotiated those pensions they intended to make good on them.