If you are a small business person, a senior, or someone who is home bound you know the importantance of home delivery of the mail. Mail at the door is not a luxury - it is a necessity. Rep. Darrell Issa, describes himself as "a fiscal conservative committed firmly to low taxes and free markets" and yet he fails to reveal the real problems facing the USPS: government mandates for excessive pre-funding of benefits for 75 years! Ask any local postmaster what he thinks is the biggest problem facing the USPS today. It is most likely he will address the pre-funding problem!
For Rep Issa to purport to be for free markets, then I believe his efforts should be towards getting Congress out of the business of running this business! The current Reform Act will not only hurt Americans and small businesses by ending deliveries, it will kill thousands of jobs.
Credo currently has a petition to express their objection to the Postal Reform Act of 2013.
The Postal Reform Act of 2013, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa and passed out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week, would implement these drastic changes to the postal service, while slashing over 100,000 mail carrier jobs, directly attacking postal employees’ collective-bargaining rights, and creating a new and entirely unnecessary oversight committee.
The postal service doesn’t need new bureaucracy, or even to cut jobs and services. What it needs is an end to the disastrous pre-funding mandate, which requires the postal service to guarantee retiree healthcare and pension benefits for 75 years — something that no other government agency or private company is forced to do.
No more Saturday mail delivery. No more door-to-door mail service for millions of Americans.
Over two-thirds of the postal service’s budget red ink comes from the onerous and ill-considered 2006 law called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), which created the pre-funding mandate.
The PAEA was created by Republicans intent on killing a vital government service for the sake of proving that government can't work. By making the public believe that government services are underfunded and poorly managed, Republicans can force more cuts and eventually privatize services altogether, handing over public goods to private corporations that enrich a select few at the expense of many.
Rep. Issa is now using the USPS budget shortfall that the Republican-sourced PAEA created as a reason to implement changes to the postal service that will make it totally uncompetitive with services like FedEx and UPS.
We can’t let them pass this bill and doom the USPS to a death-spiral that would cut services and create a needless bureaucratic oversight committee at the expense of middle-class jobs.
Both the American Postal Workers Union4 and the National Association of Letter Carriers5 have come out against Rep. Issa’s bill. Now we need to back them up with a resounding call from the grassroots to oppose this bill and end the long-term Republican plan to kill the post office.
Cutting services and jobs can be avoided by making simple and popular reforms to the postal service like those proposed in bills by Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Senate, and Rep. Peter DeFazio in the House. Their legislation would end the mandate that requires the USPS to pre-fund healthcare benefits for future retirees, while recouping $11 billion the government has overcharged the postal service.7
If Congress can't get its act together and implement necessary and simple reforms to end the pre-funding mandate and allow the USPS to operate without onerous and unnecessary restrictions, the postal service will be forced to continue cutting staff and services. We can’t let that happen.Click the link to sign the Credo petition:
Tell Congress: Oppose the Postal Reform Act of 2013.
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