Every couple months I get a magazine from the M.S. Society, labeled "Free Matter for the Blind or Handicapped". The M.S. Society doesn't pay a cent in postage to mail thousands of these magazines, and I've never requested them. In fact, a couple years back I asked them to quit sending them, but they keep coming anyways. I have 20/30 vision without glasses, and while my hands may be clumsy, I can turn the pages just fine. Fact is, only a couple percent of folks with MS are legally blind because of the disease, and maybe an odd percent or so are rendered unable to turn pages. But the M.S. Society forced the Postal Service to deliver their communications to people with M.S. for free, even though less than 5% of people with M.S. Qualify for the "Free Matter for the Blind or Handicapped" exemption. Now congress does give the Postal Service a piddly "revenue forgone" appropriation to cover this stuff and their over used franking priviledges... But fat chance they'll appropriate enough to cover the real cost of these free services. And don't even get me started on "bypass mail", a Postal Service funded program that pays for shipping everything from groceries to appliances to remote Alaskan villages at heavily subsidized rates while mail service is being cut in remote villages in the lower 48...
But that's just petty theft compared to the general fleecing of the Postal Service. Before I retired I moved semi-trailers full of mail around the loading dock of a big city Postal Service mail sorting facility. We used load straps to secure the mail in the trailers, a minimum of two to a trailer. They're big wide straps and they wholesale for about 25 bucks apiece. I often had to break open a case of them just to cover my shift... That adds up to several hundred bucks a day of load straps disappearing from just one of the Postal Service's hundreds of sorting facilities a day.
We used the load straps because the mail was loaded in giant bins and racks on wheels- forget the straps and the load would get rolling, bust out the back door, and end up on the street. And they got "nicked" too, especially the "BMCs" that weighted around 400 pounds, most of that aluminum. I found darn near a whole trailer load of them once at a well known shopping mall's loading dock, they'd been using them for hauling trash to the dumpster for months. Just looking at the materials cost I'd estimate a new "BMC" would cost well over a thousand dollars, and they keep disappearing. But that's just misdemeanor level theft.
Then there's the whole trailers that disappear. Bad enough that the Postal Service is leasing trailers from GE at such inflated rates that they've already paid for them once over and will probably pay their full purchase price in rental fees again... and again. Out of just one Postal Service fleet of 5000 trailers, about 200 are regularly missing. I remember one that hauled grain in western Minnesota for some time before it was recovered. And when a major catalog shipper went bankrupt and shut down, about 20 brand new Postal Service leased trailers were recovered- the company had been using them for storage for years!
Time to move up to the grosser misdemeanors (in comparison to the grand theft we'll discuss later) against the Postal Service. Walk into a Postal Service mail sorting facility and you see that many of the shady contractors who have been fleecing the defense department for years have found a new "customer". The Postal Service loves automation, to a fault. a few years back they we're testing the prototype of a system that could allegedly sort, between jams and breakdowns, 10,000 parcels an hour. Management quickly deduced that the only way to make it meet those specs and get it accepted (and purchased en masse) was to feed it carefully selected parcels that the machine could maybe handle. So they set up a whole labor intensive sorting operation to hand pick parcels that the machine could handle so they could get it through it's acceptance trials. Low and behold, they nursed the machine through the tests and the Postal Service bought them by the dozen. UPS and Roadway Express tried the same technology and found it couldn't be the Teamsters for cost, speed, or accuracy.
But I've saved the most heinious charges for last. Now like most of the federal government, military included, Postal workers are provided health insurance that we partly pay for. That insurance coverage continues after Postal workers retire if they wish. Given that Postal workers seem to take their sweet time getting around to retiring and the fact that at 65 they're eligible for Medicare anyways, this really doesn't cost that much. But unlike competitor UPS, other federal agencies, state and local governments, and the military, only the Postal Service is required to prepay billions of dollars for employee health care costs that won't be incurred for decades.
Why? Well, I can't think of any good reason... Which leaves the dodgy and downright corrupt reasons. Now if you're a republican congress with a republican president that would just as soon the Postal Service die and go away, wouldn't it be tempting to stick the Postal Service with a multi-billion dollar bill to prop up the Federal Employee Health Benefits plan so said congress and there staff can continue to receive their benefits, even after they're fired by the voters? I'm not sayin' that's the motive, but clearly the Postal Service is gettin' robbed blind.
So folks, please attend a Save America's Postal Service rally today and tell congress to take off the blinders and stop the grand theft of our Postal Service!