From May 7, 2013, “Blade Runner, Terminator, and the deliberate sabotage of the Postal Service“:
Ten years from today, in 2023, a baby will be born. She will grow up, head off to school, graduate from high school in the class of 2041 and then graduate from college in the class of 2045.
She will get a job with the U.S. Post Office, starting work there in 2046 and staying on until retirement at age 65 in 2088.
Just think of that date: 2088. That’s the future. It’s decades after the future we’ve imagined.
It’s 87 years after a Space Odyssey; 69 years after Blade Runner; 61 years after Children of Men; 59 years after the robots take over in Terminator; 34 years after Minority Report; four years after Total Recall.
I’ll be long dead by then. So will every current member of Congress. 2088 is a long, long way away.
And yet, today, now, at the moment, the U.S. Postal Service is required by law to already be pre-funding employee benefits for that baby who won’t be born until 2023 and won’t start working for the USPS until 2046.
Why? Well, because Americans like the Postal Service. They may not like standing in long lines at the post office — the high cost of low taxes for everyone — but they like the idea of the Postal Service. They rely on it and rely on being able to rely on it.
And the Postal Service is run by the government, even though it funds itself without any tax dollars.
So if your whole political shtick is based on being anti-government, then the Postal Service is a threat you’ve got to get rid of. That’s why, back in 2006, Republicans in Congress passed something called the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act,” requiring the agency to “pre-fund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span.”
(The USPS is also home to lots of unionized public employees, and the GOP lately has decided that unionized public employees are Public Enemy No. 1. That’s an odd claim — villainizing police officers, firefighters, first responders, teachers and mail carriers doesn’t seem like an easy or an obvious task, but that’s the current Republican plan, and the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” is a part of that strategy.)
The PAEA was designed to bankrupt the Postal Service — to turn a government service that Americans like into something that could be railed against as wasteful, inefficient and costly. That’s what the law was meant to do. That’s exactly what the law is doing, just as planned.
It was a deliberate act of sabotage. And it’s working. The whole point of requiring the agency today to fund benefits for workers it won’t hire until 2046 was to ensure that the agency wouldn’t still be around in 2046 to hire anybody. …
I don’t often get to do this, so let’s enjoy this: “Biden signs USPS reform legislation into law.”
A long-awaited reform bill expected to save the Postal Service a total of $107 billion is now law.
President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act into law Wednesday. The House and Senate passed the bill with strong bipartisan support last month.
The legislation will eliminate a 2006 mandate from Congress to pre-fund retiree health benefits, a requirement that Biden said “stretched the Postal Service’s finances almost to the breaking point, with real consequences.”
“This bill recognizes the Postal Service as a public service, and we’re ensuring that it can continue to serve all Americans for generations to come,” Biden said at Wednesday’s signing ceremony.
The bill will save USPS $50 billion over the next 10 years by eliminating a provision from the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act that required USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits well into the future.
The legislation also forgives USPS’s obligation to pay $57 billion in scheduled payments to its retiree health benefits fund.
Congress broke it in 2006 and — 16 years later — Congress finally fixed it last month in 2022.
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