He also writes about a Post Office decision. "This week," Gingrich writes, "U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahue plans to announce that all future stamps sales will be so-called 'forever stamps,' which can still be used even if postage rates go up."
Gingrich:
The Post Office will try to use any short term increase in sales from these forever stamps to solve their immediate fiscal problems. But if the Post Office is already having trouble operating at full capacity with current prices, imagine how difficult it will be to do so in five or ten years after inflation has pushed their costs up AND they are selling even fewer stamps because so many people already purchased them in the past.
In fact, this move is setting the stage for a future taxpayer bailout of the Post Office because it virtually guarantees its future bankruptcy.
he low price of stamps is not the reason why the Post Office is facing such huge deficits. The Post Office is seeking a 5.6% increase in the price of stamps despite an inflation rate of just 0.6%.
Instead, the Post Office is facing budget shortfalls because it is unwilling to engage in the necessary reform of its operations necessary in the modern economy.
As I discussed in To Save America, which is now out in an updated paperback version, the Post Office’s union work rules require it to pay a large group of employees more than a million dollars a week to do nothing. Instead of being able to lay off redundant workers, the Post Office (and by extension, every American who uses the mail) keeps them on salary through a program called “standby time.”
If the Post Office really wants to solve its fiscal challenges, it needs to engage in the difficult work of reforming its operating procedures, including its suffocating and costly union work rules like “standby time.”
Congress should block the Post Office from implementing this genuinely dumb move and force it to confront the true cause of its budget woes and implement real reform.
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