paxamericana:

anticapitalist:

Republican leaders in Congress are talking about dismembering the US Postal Service by cutting the number of delivery days, shuttering processing centers so that it will take longer for letters to arrive, closing thousands of rural and inner-city post offices and taking additional steps that would dramatically downsize one of the few national programs ordained by the original draft of the US Constitution. At the same time, supposedly “centrist” US Senators Tom Carper (D-DE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME) and Scott Brown (R-MA) are trying to build a “bipartisan consensus” for a death by slower cuts.

[…]

The postal service, we are told, is broke.

There’s only one problem with this diagnosis.

It’s wrong.

The postal service is not broke.

At the behest of the Republican-controlled Congress of the Bush-Cheney era, the USPS has been forced since 2006 to pre-fund future retiree health benefits. As the American Postal Workers Union notes, “This mandate is the primary cause of the agency’s financial crisis. No other government agency or private company bears this burden, which costs the USPS approximately $5.5 billion annually.”

Now, however, we learn that the pre-funding requirements have taken so much money from the USPS that—according to the postal service’s own inspector general—it has “significantly exceeded” the level of reserved money that the federal government or private corporations divert to meet future pension and retiree healthcare demands. “Using ratepayer funds, it has built a war chest of over $326 billion to address its future liabilities,” acknowledges Postal Service Inspector General David C. Williams.

That, argues US Senator Bernie Sanders, puts “the rationale for postal cuts in doubt.”

Republicanism is the denial of facts part nth

Bolded for emphasis. It’s also a great example of the conservative shitheel philosophy of “starving the beast.”

“Starving the beast” is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives^[1][2][3] to cut taxes in order to deprive the government of revenue in a deliberate effort to create a fiscal budget crisis that would then force the federal government to reduce spending. The short and medium term effect of the strategy has been increased United States public debt rather than reduced spending.

The term “beast” refers to the government and the programs it funds, particularly social programs^[4] such as welfare, Social Security, Medicare^[5] and public schools. The proponents of the starve-the-beast strategy have never advocated cuts in military, weapons, or prisons spending.

You underfund (or in this case, mandate huge financial burdens on) a program. When the program inevitably fails due to lack of lack of funding, you use it as an example of why the government can never do anything right and all spending should stop immediately. It’s exactly like a child breaking his favorite toy so his sister doesn’t get to play with it.