Defenders of the Post Office, 10+ years ago, said that this was unfair, because it is relatively unique treatment. The policy was instituted specifically to avoid transferring $100B+ in pension liability to the taxpayer.
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Here's something I wrote eight years ago:pic.twitter.com/PJcbVqUmAM
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"The Post Office would be profitable if only..." is, to be blunt, a lie. It is an accounting fiction. The Post Office was never profitable. It can never be profitable. The interesting argument to have is "OK, then who covers the shortfall here? We lied. We can lie no more."
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This is not a situation unique to the Post Office. It will apply to almost every public pension. It is hitting the Post Office first because the Post Office is constrained by statute to lie a little less blatantly than most public pensions.
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For more reading on pensions, which are going to be the largest financial crisis the world has ever seen, see http://pensiontsunami.com The site is 15 years old, and this was generally well understood the day they opened and for decades before that.
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Replying to @patio11
Grant that the pensions are a big deal. Now forget they exist. Is the USPS profitable? It seems to me that the point the right is trying to make is that they aren't and the USPS's defenders are arguing that they are. That's what's at the bottom of this argument.
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Replying to @_wayneburkett @patio11
The right's attack on the USPS is a claim about gov's ability to competently run organizations. The left's (clumsy) response is an attempt to say that the existence of the pensions is clouding that analysis.
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Replying to @_wayneburkett @patio11
Unless I'm missing something in your analysis, you seem to be saying, "The USPS should be accounting for these pensions this way and there's no way to call them profitable as long as these obligations exist." But it's tangential to the argument each side is really trying to have.
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Replying to @_wayneburkett
My argument, which should be pretty uncontroversial, is that approximately nobody who says "profitable" means "profitable, if you exclude labor costs", and the only way to adjust the Post Office to profitability is to exclude a large chunk of their labor costs.
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Replying to @patio11 @_wayneburkett
"They're profitable, if you assume the costs of their pension / retirement healthcare is zero" is a pretty vacuous statement. No adjustment for those costs, whether relatively conservative or sensible but with rather more risk added, gets them close to profitable.
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Note that the clueful people arguing aren't saying "They're profitable! Because math!", they're saying "Profitability isn't even a goal, of course we have to inject many billions of dollars into them, it's a government function."
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