Yesterday the National Association of Letter Carriers wrote:
The Postal Service financial turnaround is continuing into its third year of operating profitability, never more evident than in this quarter with its $1.1 billion operating profit and the increase to $7 billion in available cash. The CFO called it “a fantastic quarter.”
But Senator Thomas Carper in his reaction to USPS financials does not mention the 2006 postal reform (PAEA) pre-funding requirement.
Senator Carper released this statement on USPS 2015 FY Quarter 1 financial report:
WASHINGTON – Today, Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.), ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the following reaction to the announcement that the U.S. Postal Service lost $754 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015:
“Today’s financial report shows that even a prosperous package delivery service and record holiday delivery season can’t bring the U.S. Postal Service out of its downward financial spiral. The hard reality is that the Postal Service continues to suffer unsustainable losses that threaten its long-term viability and is unable to raise enough revenue to cover its costs. While Postal Service leadership has done what it can to cut costs, keep prices competitive, and right-size the enterprise, the ailing agency needs comprehensive postal reform. It is critical that Congress works together to pass a bipartisan and comprehensive bill as soon as possible. This news should underscore that sense of urgency. I look forward to working with my colleagues to build on the significant progress Dr. Coburn and I made on postal reform last Congress and renew our efforts to fix the serious, but solvable challenges facing the Postal Service.”
Craper,,,, cracks me up every time.
There is only 1 word that best describes the Postal Service finances- FRAUD
If any other company manipulated its finances it would be so charged. There is more fraud than just the prefunding, the inflation rate for figuring the injury comp costs is grossly manipulated as well as other adjustments to how forever stamps are accounted for etc. The postal service is having its figurative stock price dropped from its true value to pennies so it can be dumped as a bad investment. Congress is simply yelling “truth?? you can’t handle the truth!!”
Nothing is going to change, both sides of the aisle wants the 5.5 billion a year to pay for something.
you have over 110,000 postal mismanagers of which 99% have no college education. you had Donehoe trying to fix things since 2009 (the mess Potter left him)…..now you have a inbred clone named Brennen taking over. McDonalds had one bad year and the CEO was shown the door………..he was fired. I gave up on this dump years ago, came in to work, did my job, worked all the OT…..and invested in UPS and FDX stock as well as others. only good PMG’s we had was Marvin Runyon and Preston Tisch. that pre-funding is a red herring, a accounting trick…..get over it. ps-idiot Diamondstein rails about Staples…..better he go after Sen Feinstein/Blum, they are the ones who are really SELLING the USPS down the river in their no-bid postal real estate contract to buy/sell/lease postal assets. never heard one word out of that commie diamondstein mouth about feinstein……….is it some stein thing?
At the end of the day, USPS didn’t make a $1.1 billion profit – RHB is still a liability that must be funded, according to a law that Congress signed off on and the unions supported. That is why Carper is saying that, with what we know now, the postal service needs reform. his bill would alleviate the RHB prefunding issue. so i don’t see why the insults are being hurled at him here. he’s trying to get rid of some of the issues impeding USPS’s growth. the rationale of pre-funding RHB was supposed to be a good thing for employees (have you folks seen how the private sector raids retiree pensions and health benefits until there is nothing left?), but at the time, it wasn’t easily seen that FCM would plummet the way it did. so, Carper is saying, lets fix that. but interests, from unions to mailers and single-minded politicians, make it nearly impossible to forge a compromise. and for those that truly believe that all usps needs to to a) get rid of management and b) maintain its current infrastructure and employee levels, your wishful thinking is getting in the way. if you want USPS to be flexible like a business in pursuing revenue (i.e. postal banking), they also need to be able to control expenses and flex their network in order to adapt to the volume and type of product they are servicing. to stick with 32,000 post offices and over 600k employees no matter what seems unrealistic.
What is unrealistic is to have to pay 75 years into the future for employees that are not born yet and that the amount we pay is fixed at 2006 levels which were near 800k as opposed to the near 600k you mention. So in reality the postal service will never hire these 200,000 employees but by law is forced to pay their health benefits in advance until the year 2081 at a 100% level. Name a business that has to do that, oh yeah there is not one. Senator Carper’s bill is a farce when compared to numerous other bills that have been held from getting out of committee. As far as postal banking it is not new it was taken away because of lobbying much as the copiers that used to be in post offices and any ability to utilize the largest vehicle fleet in the world. (Think information provide on weather and roads as well as basic advertising all of which are illegal for USPS)
They are using us for slaves and they keep the $$$$$$ , we get the few leftovers. We are the big cash cow for politicans
The first sentence of Carper’s statement says that the USPS lost $754 billion. Three quarters of a trillion dollars is an astounding amount of money. Hell, you could launch an unwarranted invasion of another country for that kind of dough. Either a typo or a matter of hyper-hyperbole.
The Pre-funding of the retirement health benefits was created in 2006 a time when the postal service had the most full time employees ever and the highest mail volume so everyone thought it would be no big deal, but since then the Postal Service has reduced staffing in half and reduced mail processing plants by more then that so why doesn’t Congress realize that we shouldn’t have to pay the full amount from 2006 anymore and figure the prefunding using the amount of people working full time at the postal service in 2012? The answer is simple if they did that then the Postal Service would be making a profit right now and there would be no more money coming in for them to use for other government projects with the promise of paying it back later. After 2016 when the postal service is free of the prefunding requirement congress will no longer have anything to push the selling of the postal service that’s why they are pushing so hard now to scream gloom and doom when the sun is starting to shine over the horizon and the clouds are fading.
I wonder if my mortgage company will let me default on my payments, because I find them to be an “unfair burden.” Everyone in this organization including the unions didn’t have a problem with this prefunding payment when the legislation was signed. But now, since we can’t make the payments, all of a sudden it is “unfair.” The fact of the matter is the mail volume has changed dramatically in the last several years, and will continue to do so. Yes, we are making an operating profit now. We also make one every Christmas season. Even if we skip the prefunding payment again, there still isn’t enough to pay down the operating line of credit that the PO is maxed out on, and replace the vehicles which are completely worn out and junk. Come contract negotiation time, the unions will once again continue to give up stuff, as long as, they can keep up their membership numbers. We need to eliminate Saturday delivery, and require people to put up curbside boxes. The unions have a chance now, to implement this change the right way. Have the PO hire more CCA’s, since they don’t get benefits anyway , to deliver packages on Saturday, and then the union membership numbers will stay up. We won’t lose business like the NALC says, because we are still the cheapest and people will adjust accordingly rather than ship with someone else. Make it a law so no one can access our mailboxes on Saturday, and problem solved. Offer early retirements, and no one will lose their job. However, since this entire organization is nothing but a political game, I believe nothing will change, and we will be talking about these same things a year from now.
Issa always a carper in the bush ! Every body get off the dime and show these lo ifes a bit of your stuff and weed ’em out !
The USPS is managed by a bunch of idiots that aren’t qualified to run a lemonade stand, and Carper is in bed with them. He pretends that he wants to come to the rescue of the postal service with his so-called reform but he fails to acknowledge that it was him and other morons in Washington who put the USPS in this position in the first place. For some reason he’s got a problem with people that actually work for a living; the people that work for a living should realize that this jackass works for them, and should fire him.
Does anyone even listen to this jag-off anymore? I thought they stopped taking him seriously years ago.
2016 is the last year for the pre- funding PAEA….. When is Congress gonna return the 45 to 55 billion dollar overpayment we have in one of our pension and health funds????? Why is that never addressed???? Last thing,, we made around 400 million dollars from selling all these post offices the last 2 years.. Where’s that money at????
Senator Carper refuses to say that the prefunding crap is the reason the Postal Service stays in the red! The senator, and his friend, ex president Forrest Gump, pushed the prefunding down the Postal Service throat! The pre funding is but an artificial, invented, unnecessary, imitation, fantasy land cost designed to destroy the Postal Service! Why not require every other government agency and private co. in America to prefund it’s health care costs? Senator Carper is just full of baked bean gas!
Damn Carper, if you want to get together with “DR. COBURN” then just tell him. Don’t drag a whole American Institution down just to do it.
real reform will cutting HQ back to 70 employees,which is still 65 more than needed.and keeping dreaming mr carper “dr”coburn is the enemy of all craft employees,and he is a quack not a dr.
The retirement pre-funding law was designed to do exactly what W. and his Republican assholes wanted to do: put the USPS right where it is. At one time Carper was a friend of the NALC but his “significant” work on reform includes five day delivery and more downsizing. With “friends” like this in Congress, who needs enemies?
Eliminating the pre-funding requirement alone would wipe out the debt and give the Service the much needed capital to modernize smartly and with minimal impact to service and reduce any threats to job losses. However, that would make sense, and we can’t have that. Too many influential parties, the USPS’ competitors and direct marketers among them, would love to see the Service fall into private hands, but that damn Constitution gets in their way.
We have no idea how fortunate we are to have such a strong document written by truly visionary and enlightened men who thought of damn near every contingency, so much so not even the horrific crooks running the nation today can get around it.
That will be the saving grace for the USPS. However, I envision someday in our future a government so completely corrupt and destructive that it will find a way to declare the Constitution null and void, and we can kiss our collective asses goodbye at that point.
Until then, we must be proactive and demand Congress do the right thing in a reform bill: eliminate pre-funding for retirement, make six day permanent, and prohibit any further consolidation or reduction of service standards. It wouldn’t hurt to form a strong totally independent oversight body that will keep postal management in line, and have the ability to remove offenders and prosecute those who design and implement programs that deliberately hurt the best interests of what is a service, not a publicly traded stock. Not that I’m expecting anything of the sort.
Barack Obama voted for the PAEA (Postal Reform Act) of 2006. So did Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry. In, fact, it passed the Senate with 100% consent, not a single senator objected to the language in the bill. And the co sponsors of the bill in the house were two Democrats, Danny Davis and Henry Waxman. – Both the NALC and NPMHU endorsed the bill.
This guy is a clown. Why not just once and for all just come right out and say that the Postal Service has paid enough into the prefunding account and that the Postal Service is not required to pay anything else into this account. But how could these clowns try to destroy the Service unless they can make up some crap about how much money they are losing? The Postal Service made $1.1 billion lasr quarter. Not bad for a “service” to the American people. What a joke!!
Get rid of the mandatory retirement funding requirement. Idiots.
This guy is on heavy drugs …..
Yes, the PO needs “urgent” reform. It’s managers need to be made to understand that employees are NOT robots and numbers don’t tell the whole story. And what do those Fat Cats in DC know about reform? Just more BS!