This is happening everywhere with all kinds of government services. "Slash budgets" and by firing full time employees and cutting investment, piecemeal it out to the lowest-bid contractor, the quality of service deteriorates, not much money is actually saved, but someone gets rich(er)!

And when the service fails, you can point to it as the reason government solutions don't work and how regulation is bad, which provides convenient reasoning to strip more regulations and privatize more government services.

And it has a name as well : Starve the beast.

Like every political push, the intent was noble. But it only gains legs when some entrenched interest can profit.

Noble? Maybe... I'd say it's dishonest at best. If the USPS failed on its own, there might be a point to the argument that the government is inefficient. But when lawmakers destroy something and then claim that it destroyed itself and therefore we must destroy everything else, it doesn't quite seem right.

It's like smashing a window with a baseball bat to prove glass is easily breakable. Yes the glass broke, that's why you don't hit it with a baseball bat. Rather than replacing the windows with brick, how about just not hitting it with a baseball bat? If you want to prove how easily breakable the glass is, let is break (or not) on its own.

You're responding on a completely different level than what I actually said.

> If the USPS failed on its own, there might be a point to the argument that the government is inefficient. But when lawmakers destroy something and then claim that it destroyed itself and therefore we must destroy everything else, it doesn't quite seem right.

To be clear, I agree with this. I like the USPS, and think they do a great job.

The point is that grassroots support for "starve the beast" didn't start out focused on the USPS. The USPS was just one of the more vulnerable targets, plus some business stood to gain, so politicians directed the ire there. It's similar dynamic to how in these "government shutdowns", national parks close but the TSA keeps right on going. Or locally, how trying to keep real estate taxes down ends putting the screws on teachers and firefighters, rather than shrinking the town bureaucracy.

The larger point is to avoid simplistically ascribing the worst intent to the "other team". It's an easy answer, but prevents understanding that they actually have legitimate points. And it drives adherence to the agenda of your familiar team, which is also busy manufacturing consent for corporate agendas in a similar manner.

>the quality of service deteriorates, not much money is actually saved,

not only does the service get worse but cost actually goes up.

>It started with the mandate to pre-fund pension and healthcare benefits for the next 75 years, funding pensions for retired employees who aren't even born yet.

This is wholly inaccurate. All that the USPS is being required to do is set aside money to pay for pension liabilities that they have incurred. Nothing close to funding pensions for employees that have yet to be born.

Besides, this is all hypothetical as the USPS has not actually made the payments they were supposed to.

>the USPS has not actually made the payments they were supposed to

That's so 100% disprovable, so easily disprovable, disproven by the first link in the comment you directly replied to, that I'm have a hard time assuming good faith in your argument as the HN guidelines tell me to do.

He’s correct. If they had made the payments they were suppose to, the health benefits account would have been fully funded by 2017. Because they didn’t, it is only half funded and is running deficits.

I'm reading the first link and I see language like "83 percent," "50 percent funded," and "unfunded by $86.6 billion." Are you interpreting treis' comment as "hasn't made any of the payments?" Because I read it as, "hasn't made all of the payments," which seems accurate.

The USPS has missed most of they payments, not making a full one since 2010. The health benefits fund (the 50% one) was the only one that needed to be funded and much of that funding came from transfers from the other, overfunded, pension accounts.

Anyway, the point is moot, since the prefunding period is over and the payments are now on the permanent schedule. Because the Post Office couldn’t fully find the account, the fund is now running deficits and will be depleted in a decade.

"Hasn't made any of the payments" is the only way to read it when they're saying "it's hypothetical". Once the first payment is made, it's not hypothetical any more. It's real money. The USPS only stopped paying because they were more than $8b in debt and could no longer afford the $5.7b per year they needed to pay. Which goes to prove the point that Congress is intentionally taxing them out of business.

If I owe you money and I stop paying and my argument for stopping paying you is that I don't have any money left, do you claim that my money problems are hypothetical because I haven't paid it all? No. They're very real, highlighted by the fact that I can't pay the rest.

>I'm have a hard time assuming good faith in your argument as the HN guidelines tell me to do.

Seriously? You should Google before becoming quite so self righteous:

>It is not the first time the Postal Service has missed its required payments to prefund retirees’ health benefits. From 2012 through 2016, the agency failed to deliver nearly $34 billion toward its pool for retirees’ health care.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2017/09/usps-defaults-bil...

Please explain your use of the word "hypothetical". That might be where I am getting confused. Because the only way I'm interpreting that statement is "the USPS can't blame this law for their money problems because they haven't even made any payments"

At best, I might be able to twist the words to say "the USPS's money problems aren't real because they can't afford to pay their debt", which makes no sense.

The reality of the situation is the $5.7b they're required to pay every year is more than they can afford to pay, so they paid it until they reached $8b in debt and then stopped paying. None of that is hypothetical in any way.

I don't know where you got your numbers but they certainly don't reflect reality. As my cite says, they missed ~34 billion worth of payments. As your cite says they're missing 86 billion dollars that they need to pay their pension obligations.

>Please explain your use of the word "hypothetical".

Hypothetical as in they are not actual real outflows of cash from the USPS. They can't be blamed for the USPS' financial woes since they haven't made a payment in 7 years now.

Yes, set aside liabilities for 75 years in the future. They effectively have to fund people before they're born, unless you think they've got a lot of workers who'll be there over 75 years old.

So, yes, they have to fund. And they're struggling because they're being subject to deliberate and malicious political attack on public services.

>Yes, set aside liabilities for 75 years in the future. They effectively have to fund people before they're born, unless you think they've got a lot of workers who'll be there over 75 years old.

They have to set aside money to pay pension obligations that they have incurred to their current employees. No money is being set aside to pay pensions for workers who have yet to be born. A tiny fraction of the money set aside may be paid out in 75 years, but it won't be to a worker that has yet to be born. It would be paid to a current USPS employee that is still living 75 years from now.

>So, yes, they have to fund. And they're struggling because they're being subject to deliberate and malicious political attack on public services.

For other reasons, perhaps, but not for the pre-funding requirement.

What other government agencies pre-fund or have been forced to make up their funding?

Is a pay-as-you-go pension really a smart option if your #1 product/mandate (first class mail) is at total risk of becoming irrelevant in the near-term?

Those aren't the only options. It's hard to argue that the goal isn't the complete destruction of the USPS when you mandate they pre-pay pensions 75 years in advance and then forbid them from raising prices to fulfill that mandate.

If the USPS is going to become irrelevant in the near-term, does stockpiling 75 years worth of pensions really make sense?

We agree that the pension obligations are the reason why the USPS (once one of the most innovative logistics organizations in the world) has degraded so throughly. But pointing to shadowy private interests is backfilling personal politics into the narrative. The obvious culprit of USPS' debilitating pension obligations the pensioners themselves.

The pensioners create the pension system of their employer?