Columnist Phil Reisman repeated misleading "conventional wisdom"
about U.S. Postal Service finances in asserting that “email, social
media and the Internet in general are the primary cause of the Postal
Service’s chronic woes.”
Were increased Internet usage indeed
causing the red ink that some in Washington, D.C., claim necessitates
service cuts, then your readers could only shrug and accept the slowing
of the mail, proposed ending of Saturday delivery, and replacement of
door delivery with neighborhood cluster boxes.
Fortunately, that’s
not the case. Postal operations are profitable, and increasingly so.
The Postal Service reported $1.4 billion in Fiscal Year 2014 operating
profits, a figure already surpassed halfway through 2015. As the economy
recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, mail
revenue has stabilized. Meanwhile, as folks in Westchester County and
elsewhere shop online, package revenue is skyrocketing, making the
Internet a net positive.
The red ink stems not from the mail or
the Internet, but from Washington politics. In 2006, a lame-duck
Congress mandated that the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health
benefits. No other agency or company has to pre-fund for even one year;
the Postal Service must pre-fund 75 years into the future and pay for
it all over a decade. That $5.6 billion annual charge is the red ink.
Degrading
profitable postal networks is illogical. Instead, New Yorkers should
urge lawmakers to address the pre-funding fiasco. Then the Postal
Service can continue to offer Americans the world's most-affordable
delivery network.
Source : http://www.lohud.com
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