USPS could default on a $5.5 billion payment for Pensions
The US Postal Service is so deeply in debt that it could default on a $5.5 billion payment for retiree benefits by month’s end.
No surprise there. Total mail volume is down 20 percent from four years ago — and Americans are mailing stamped envelopes only half as often as they did in 2000.
That’s largely because more than 200 million Americans subscribe to e-mail and other online options, which the Postal Service considers a “disruptive” innovation — “the primary cause of our revenue shortfall,” says CFO Joe Corbett.
Meanwhile, advertisers now target shoppers online instead of by mail, while just 26 percent of consumers are paying bills with paper checks. Everything’s just easier when you cut out the middleman — the postman.
But even as mail volume is shrinking, the postal service keeps getting more expensive. Labor costs have been rising and now make up 80 percent of USPS expenses.
The biggest burden: health-care benefits for retirees. Adjusted for inflation, health-care costs have soared 448 percent since 1972. Back then, benefits were only 8 percent of the USPS’ operating expenses — but by last year they were 30 percent.
The result: The USPS lost $2.8 billion in 2008, $3.7 billion in 2009, $8.3 billion last year, and it’s $8.5 billion in the red this year.
Don’t blame the men and women in blue — the Postal Service has made heroic efforts to slash its expenses, but it can’t get out of the hole alone.
Though officially an independent agency, it operates under the heavy hand of Congress, which crafted the retiree-benefit standards that are sinking the agency.
So the USPS is asking Congress for permission to cut 120,000 employees, shed another 100,000 through attrition and fix its failing health-care system to remain afloat. – NYPost
How can the beast keep itself afloat in a deathbed economy and a nonexistent gold reserve that is more protected to hide that secret than it is to protect the few bars of gold that are mixed in with the fake gold? How much longer can Satan keep blinders on the eyes of those on his Titanic Beast that is slowly sinking into the abyss of agony?
Psalm 48:6 “Trembling seized them there, agony like that of a woman in labor,”
The residents of the United States are presently feeling the labor pains, and “labor” is mirrored in the loss of jobs that is causing the domino effect as the U.S. economy continues its collapse into the pit of despair.
Isaiah 13:8 “They will be horrified; pain and agony will seize [them]; they will be in anguish like a woman in labor. They will look at each other, their faces flushed with fear.”
