What Good Is Government?

[Lakhota]

Good government is good. We should all want good government.

• Government is Good - An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution
  Government is Good - An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution - 24k - similar pages
  Details government s crucial role in improving Americans lives and promoting the public good. Also critiques the right-wing attack on government.
  • Government is Good - Why We Need More, Not Less, Government
    Government is Good - Why We Need More, Not Less, Government - 16k - similar pages
    In the face of increasing threats to our wellbeing and the inability of the market or individual efforts to effectively address them, we need to expand public sector ...
• Government is Good - A Day in Your Life
  Government is Good - A Day in Your Life - 16k - similar pages
  whose signals crowd our nation's airwaves. 6:35 a.m. Like 17 million ... You simply take for granted that this water is safe to drink. But in fact you ... 7:01 a.m. Government also helps you own your house in more than the legal sense. On a more ...

75 Ways Socialism Has Improved America

 

[Lakhota]

One should not leave out the context when discussing USPS: A manufactured crisis by Republicans.

A Manufactured ‘Crisis’: Congress Can Let The Post Office Save Itself Without Mass Layoffs Or Service Reductions

Both the news media and a number of politicians have claimed recently that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is in “crisis,” and that it is necessary to lay off thousands of workers or reduce service in order to make the post office fiscally stable. And the Post Office itself has proposed laying off as many as 120,000 employees and withdrawing from federal health care plans in order to navigate upcoming fiscal crunches.

It is true that USPS is facing fiscal challenges — it lost nearly $20 billion over the last four years and is at risk of not being able to meet a $5.5 billion mandated payment to the Treasury at the end of this month (which has been put off six weeks thanks to the last continuing resolution in Congress).

But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporationis required to do.”

As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today:

More: A Manufactured ‘Crisis’: Congress Can Let The Post Office Save Itself Without Mass Layoffs Or Service Reductions