Surprise, The GOP Is After The Postal Service Again
Thanks, in part, to the coronavirus, the USPS will run out of money by September. Trump does not want to bail it out, despite it being one of the best, most affordable ways the lower and middle classes send and receive information, goods, and offer services while also employing nearly 500,000 people. With the clockwork of a locust swarm, Republicans have crawled out of their holes of complete and total indifference toward the USPS to suddenly give way too much of a shit about it. One of their go-to arguments is that the post office losses billions of dollars a year. Valid point ... If only that budgetary disaster weren't the direct fault of the GOP.
See, in 2006, Republicans forced the Postal Service to pre-fund its retirement plans for 75 years. No private or public entities have ever done that in the totality of human existence, because it's stupid for one specific entity to do it while the rest of the world follows completely different rules. The post office is the only company in existence funding the retirement of employees it hasn't hired yet because they haven't been born. That alone has saddled the post office with an additional $5 billion a year in expenses. Before the GOP purposefully sabotaged the USPS, they were operating a surplus of $900 million a year. It actually made money. A lot of that windfall comes from the sale of stamps, which people aren't really buying much now that the invisible monster of a viral pandemic has turned us all into shut-ins who rarely go out to feel the sun's warm touch, let alone buy stickers of eagles and dead '50s celebrities.
In trying to set up a long-con to blame the USPS' mere existence for its budgetary woes (and by extension that privatization is the way to go), what Republicans have actually done is prove that they're saboteurs who ruin perfectly good things for no reason -- other than to satisfy the requirements of their dipshit ideology, no matter how far removed from reality it may be.
Republicans see the post office as just another business that some enterprising uber-capitalist asshole, who's another in a long line of Bobs and Bills born and wet-nursed within the corporate hierarchy, can use as an excuse to charge $5 to send a letter, while never using those high prices to give employees a living wage. To reach that magical Shangri-La, Republicans artificially created massive deficits and then started using their own sabotage as an excuse to cut the whole thing entirely -- and all in their quest to prove the government doesn't work. The GOP is setting their own house on fire and blaming the house for not being more resistant to the gasoline and lit matches they threw at it.
Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. And now you can listen to the first episode on Youtube!
Top image: Pope Moysuh/Upsplash
