US Post Office $47 Billion in the hole

This is the key to the whole problem:

"The agency is saddled with a congressional mandate that requires it to prefund more than $5.5 billion annually for health benefits for future retirees. The service said Monday that it won't be able to make its required $5.7 billion payment by Sept. 30."

No other corporation in America is required to prefund currently all future retirement costs. 

Otherwise, the actual operating revenues exceed costs.

This is to give congress another slush fund like social security and medicare.

Cursty,

If they are really defunct for having to fund payments they will have to make out in the future, then they are not a solvent corporation.  The fact is that sooner or later the money has to be there to pay off those large retirments which have been promised. Sadly, they should be responsible for them.  But even sadder is the fact that this will eventually be their downfall, much like the other large corporations who promise huge retirement plans and benefits.  If you donot take in enough money to fund these, where do they beleive the money will come from?  It becomes a game of shifting money from one pool to the next, and eventually someone will be left with nothing.

Yet they are now running commercials about Sunday delivery and how it is now a reality.

I love the post office! I can send stuff across the country for a few dollars. Have they mismanaged themselves? Heck yah. Who did that?

_____________________

Not so.  Did you fund your entire retirement the day you started working?  That is what they are having to do.  As I said before, no other organization in the country is required to do this. 

While I agree that the payment mandate is a drag on the post office - it is far from what is causing issues.  This is from a 2013 Time article:

When Congress imposed those mandates in 2006, the Post Office was doing just fine. Digital communication had yet to take such a huge bite out of the amount of mail the USPS processed and delivered. First-class mail volume was about 97 billion pieces in 2006. So there wasn’t much of a backlash when Congress decided that the Post Office was healthy enough to lock in health benefits for future retirees — for the next 75 years, mind you, something no other public or private agency does.

Two years later, the U.S. was hit by the Great Recession at around the same time  that mobile communication and things like online bill payments were growing at explosive rates. The Post Office began reporting massive deficits from which it has yet to recover. Last year it delivered only 68 billion pieces of mail.

So far the Post Office has placed about $44 billion in that pre-retiree account. Without the mandate, the Post Office’s financials — while still not completely healthy — would be much more stable.

In a sense, the problems facing the Post Office are a microcosm of what’s happening with retiree benefits in the U.S. more generally. As a nation, we’ve promised benefits to retirees that either we can’t afford or aren’t willing to fully fund.

http://business.time.com/2013/...day-postal-delivery/