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View Full Version : Government Accounting Causing the End of the Post Office



Conley
10-07-2011, 07:46 AM
You might have heard that the United States Postal Service is in trouble: that it's losing billions, that it will have to end Saturday service and close branches — and most inflammatory, that it might need a government bailout. Perhaps you heard that the Postal Service couldn't pay $5.5 billion bill that came due Sept. 30 and that only an emergency postponement saved it from the government's equivalent of default.

In fact, it's the Postal Service that’s currently bailing out the U.S. government. Politicians have been raiding Postal Service revenues for years, using them to make the federal deficit appear smaller than it really is. The fiscal gyrations are so twisted that the Postal Service is right now forced to pre-pay health care benefits for employees the agency hasn't even hired yet — in fact, for many future employees who haven't even been born yet — all to artificially shrink the federal deficit.

It's these crushing accounting tricks, not the cost of delivering mail, that has pushed this 200-year-old institution to the brink.

Welcome to the wacky world of Washington, D.C., accounting.

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/07/8191425-twisted-government-accounting-behind-postal-service-woes

Same thing these guys have done to social security, raiding the coffers more and more.

MMC
10-07-2011, 08:27 AM
Same thing they will do if they get an Infrastructure Bank approved for the Fed too. >:(

Conley
10-07-2011, 08:29 AM
Same thing they will do if they get an Infrastructure Bank approved for the Fed too. >:(


You are 100% correct. Reading the article it is amazing the Post Office has survived as long as it has. What those pols don't seem to realize is that if they kill it off entirely then there'll be nowhere to hide the debt any more and that chit will come clawing its way back to the Treasury Department like something out of a horror movie.