The Nyack Villager

The US Post Office should have a surplus of $1.5 billion today— not a deficit of $19.5 billion.

This financial problem was not caused by the Post Office, but by a law passed by the Republican-led Congress, in the last days of 2006.

The law that caused the deficit is the Postal Accountability Act of 2006. Under this law, the US Post Office is forced to pre-pay future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years—all in just 10 years.

This bill will seriously harm tens of millions of Americans, senior adults, rural residents and small business owners. Many depend on the Post Office for delivery of prescription medication, small town newspapers, local advertising and political information.

Instead of preserving the price of stamps, paying its workers and it maintaining its facilities, the Post Office is forced to use its current income and borrow billions and billions of dollars to pay for health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet—some- thing that no other government agency or private corporation is required to do.

The Post office will be forced to close hundred of offices and lay off thousands of workers and drastically reduce the services it has provided citizens and business for two hundred years.

Rockland’s Congressman Eliot Engel criticized the US Postal Service for eliminating overnight service for First Class mail. The Post Office is considering closing mail processing facilities, including the one in Monsey. They have already closed the Bronx Distribution Center.

Congressman Engel said, “It is a self-fulfilling prophecy—you provide inferior service, and you drive away business. This gives them another excuse to curtail even more services and all of a sudden it’s a downward spiral to poorer service. This is a business plan doomed to fail. They should be looking for ways to cut waste rather than eliminate jobs. It is almost as if they want people to use the private carriers instead. It is ridiculous that a letter mailed to a neighbor down the street should not arrive the next day. It takes longer for me to send a letter from my Rockland Office to my Bronx Office than it would take me to walk it across the Tappan Zee Bridge.”

In an effort to stop all this, several senators including Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York’s Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill that would go a long way toward resolving the Post Office’s financial crisis.

The bill, called Postal Service Protection Act, would fix the Postal Service’s immediate financial crisis by allowing the Post Office to recover the advance overpayments it made to its retiree pension funds, $7 billion overpayment to the Federal Employees Retirement System and $50 billion overpayment to the Civil Service Retirement System.

In addition, the bill would eliminate the unique requirement that the US Post Office pre-fund 75 years worth of future retiree health benefits in just 10 years. This law would establish new ways to generate revenue by ending a rule prohibiting Post Office access to modern conveniences, such as new high-tech media and digital services. It would allow money-making services like notary assistance and the shipping of wine and beer to all states.

The bill would protect Post Office mail processing facilities by requiring new, stricter and safer standards for first-class mail, and would keep six-day delivery.

Shel Haber, a stage, film and television art director, is co-publisher of The Nyack Villager.