The announcement sounds startling, but it’s not as shocking as it sounds.
The Post Office is designed for insolvency. It was designed to maintain an artificially affordable rate. But much of the money meant to protect that rate was instead diverted to generous union giveaways and incompetent bureaucracy. So there’s yet another 5 year countdown.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) will run out of cash in five years. Postmaster General Megan Brennan shared this news in testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee earlier this month. The immediate consequence of USPS becoming insolvent would be that the world’s largest postal system — which moves 150 billion mail pieces per year, or 412 million pieces per day — would be dead in the water. This is something that has never occurred in the Postal Service’s long and storied history.
Nor will it.
Between the timidity of Republicans and the power of the postal unions over the Democrats, this broken machine will keep rumbling along even though its main uses these days are junk mail and Amazon deliveries.
We should instead begin a serious conversation about how much of a post office we need. And how to scale it down.
If we don’t, a future Dem will try to implement Elizabeth Warren’s plan or one of the other plans to move the post office into providing banking services or something just as bad.
Leave a Reply