Post Office

The Post Office is one of many businesses that are changing because of the Internet. They are losing business as people pay bills on line and write emails instead of letters. It is in the process of going out of business but in an attempt to stave off the end the Union has come up with a story that may not be true. In 2006 the congress told the Post Office that they had to put more money into their pension fund and into the fund that pays for health care so the government would not have to step in and bail them out. Each year for ten years starting in 2007 the PO is required to put 5 billion into these two funds. This has accelerated the losses and caused management to threaten lays offs and curtail Saturday delivery. The Union says the problem is not fewer letters but the payments to the pension and that these payments are not necessary. They maintain that these two funds have more funding that is needed and they want to divert some of these pension monies to current expenses to keep from having lay-offs. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) has recently released a report saying that the pension funds do not have extra money and if the 5 billion payments are not made the funds will run short and the taxpayers will have to bail out the PO. As the United State Postal Service faces dire financial straits, a report to be released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office asserts that the solution suggested by USPS would not solve the Postal Service’s financial problems, and would instead result in what would essentially be a taxpayer bailout. USPS contends that the $8.5 billion it lost last year, and the $10 billion it is projected to lose this year, is because it has paid too much money to the federal government to fund retiree health benefits, and it would like to be given access to that overpaid sum in order to help alleviate some of the financial pressure. But in a document obtained by The Daily Caller to be released later on Thursday, the GAO says that based on its analysis, there is no such overpayment. Moreover, it concludes, to pay out the requested money would only stave off disaster, not solve USPS’ underlying financial problems, and instead, it would simply increase the federal government’s liability, which would have to be funded through tax revenue and borrowing, in other words, by taxpayers.