BY BOB BEARDEN
To borrow a line from the late great Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the U.S. Postal Service have been highly exaggerated.
The Trumpster is at his fake news twitter feed again. Tossing out lie after lie as per usual. One might say so what else is new? This time with an attack against the Postal Service and Amazon. Amazon and the Postal Service entered into an agreement several years ago for the service to deliver parcels for Amazon ordered over the internet seven days a week that has been a very successful and highly profitable undertaking by both the Postal Service and Amazon. The Postal Service has increased its parcel delivery by over 67% over that time thanks to Amazon and their customers.
The Postal Service, despite the fake news being tweeted from Mar-a-Largo, isn’t going broke nor is it losing billions of dollars. Over the past three years it has turned a profit of over $1 billion in each of those years. This year the profit was down slightly to around $600 million.
The problem with their bottom line is that the Postal Service is hamstrung by the onerous pre-funding mandate enacted by the 2006 lame-duck Congress – it requires the service to place $5.5 billion each year in a fund to pre-fund Postal Service retirees’ health benefits 75 years into the future. No entity in the world has ever had that requirement save the U.S. Postal Service. The money belongs to the Postal Service, but Congress won’t let go of it because they use it each year to help balance the budget.
It makes no sense except in the light of trying to destroy the postal service and give a lot of the services it provides over to private delivery services. And on that issue the Postal Service competes quite well against private delivery giants such as FedEx and UPS. The service delivers 34% of all end deliveries for UPS since the UPS doesn’t deliver to every address in America like the postal service does. It also delivers 30% of all end deliveries for FedEx.
And to top that off, every year for the past several years the Postal Service has outperformed both of those services during the Christmas period. The Postal Service is the only government entity that actually is part of our constitution and it does its job efficiently and without taxpayer dollars. It has not received any money from the government since 1981. These are facts easily checked and proven for anyone who wants to know the real story – obviously, the Trumpster doesn’t!
But if you are a rabid Trump supporter you probably will prefer to believes his lies rather than the facts that hit you in the face. Truth is often hard for Trump’s minions to swallow since they don’t like to deal in reality. They prefer the world of Access Hollywood and watching the Trumpster yell “you’re fired” on a fake TV program.
Pity the poor devils who now have been taken again by the Trumpster. Suck up, guys – he ain’t done yet!
– Bob Bearden is a trustee with the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation and a nember of Mayflower Congregational Church UCC in Oklahoma City
