Ready To Say Goodbye To The U.S. Postal Service?

Last month we looked at how the right-wing agenda being pushed by Republicans is destroying basic services like the Post Office. We honed in on rural post offices in Wisconsin but what's true for them is true for all of us. With income inequality higher in America any time since a Republican last represented NY-9 in Congress (1923) and poverty rating rising as fast as health insurance coverage is diminishing, the American right is hell-bent on accomplishing their dream of finally overturning the New Deal and establishing a less democratic, more authoritarian, more corporate-oriented country.

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that in 2010, median household income declined, the poverty rate increased and the percentage without health insurance coverage was not statistically different from the previous year.

Real median household income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2009 median.

The nation's official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009-- the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in 2009-- the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.

The number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 49.0 million in 2009 to 49.9 million in 2010, while the percentage without coverage--16.3 percent-- was not statistically different from the rate in 2009.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: "These numbers confirm what millions of Americans have long felt. The recovery is not trickling down to the average worker, with communities of color, women, and single-parent households still feeling the harshest effects of the Great Recession. We cannot expect these trends to reverse themselves; concerted action is needed to create jobs and invest in vulnerable families if we are to ensure shared prosperity and opportunity for all.”

And although the CBO has made it clear that "cutting spending and raising taxes now could put a drag on the economy," that has only spurred the Republicans on to call for even more of exactly that. And the post office is very much in their sites. You've seen the TV ad up top, right?

Yesterday Karl Frisch went into the explicit details about how the Republican Party took the opportunity of a weak, inexperienced, ineffective Democratic president with horribly conflicted advisers to bring to fruition their goal of crippling and abolishing the United States post office.

The power to create post offices is enumerated in our Constitution. Our Postal Service is even fully funded by the sale of stamps, not through tax dollars. That is a combo that should bring tears of joy to the eyes of tea partiers and Republicans alike.

GOP efforts to cripple the Postal Service predate the current tea party “cut government spending” drumbeat echoing throughout Washington during these difficult economic times.

Five years ago, during the Bush administration, the Postal Service handled the largest volume of mail ever seen in its 236-year history. It was in that year, that the Republican controlled Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA).

The legislation’s title certainly sounds pretty great. But, as is the case with so much in Washington, the words chosen were simply window dressing for a very destructive proposal.

As Truth-Out.org’s Allison Kilkenny recently reported, by passing PAEA, Congressional Republicans mandated that within ten years the United States Postal Service would have to fully fund retirement healthcare benefits for the next 75 years. Or to put it more plainly, the Postal Service had a decade to fully fund the retirement healthcare benefits for future employees that will not even be born until 2057 at the earliest.

Of course, if tea partiers succeed in repealing child labor laws (because we all know that little hands are better for cutting stamps) we can probably drop that year to the mid-2040s.

Interestingly, this dreadful law holds a delicious bite of irony in that it requires government-funded universal healthcare benefits for Americans that will not be born for a generation.

Imagine what the right would say if President Obama and the Democrats proposed legislation that required businesses and corporations to fully fund healthcare benefits for all of their current workers and workers who haven not even been born yet.

Socialist. Communist. Marxist. Maoist. Pick any of the ists. They would call Obama a cartoonist if they thought it would kill the bill.

The only reason we keep hearing so much about the Postal Service’s impending budget shortfall is because PAEA requires that on September 30 a down payment be made on the healthcare benefits of postal workers 75 years into the future. This law has forced the Postal Service into the red for two years running.

In the end, Republicans know the Postal Service is a government agency that works well for Americans. And you know the GOP cannot have an example of good government floating around out there lest it get in the way of their political aspirations.

Why let a self-funding government agency flourish when you can privatize it and make your corporate cronies even richer?