The United States Postal Service is so low on cash that it won’t be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and will, therefore, have to shut down.
The last day of mail delivery will be Tuesday, December 31, 2013. “There’s no way we can handle the holiday rush this year, we can barely handle a normal delivery day,” said a Post Office insider.
The Obama Administration feel that the shut down will save money and they do not feel that Americans will miss their mail. “Most Americans get everything they need in email. And most Americans only get bills in the mail. So if we cut out the post office, we will save Americans on bills,” said White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney.
The postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview with WWN. “Americans don’t need any more catalogues. We could ask Congress to bail us out, but what’s the point. We had a good run.”
Recently, Mr. Donahoe was pushing for eliminating Saturday mail delivery, closing up to 3,700 postal locations and laying off 120,000 workers — nearly one-fifth of the agency’s work force — despite a no-layoffs clause in the unions’ contracts.
But, Donahoe feels closing up the whole Post Office system is better. “We should let the private sector handle the mail. They do a better job anyway.”
At the end of the month the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks, officials warn, forcing it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly.
Mail volume has plummeted with the rise of e-mail, electronic bill-paying and a Web that makes everything from fashion catalogs to news instantly available. The system will handle an estimated 167 billion pieces of mail this fiscal year, down 22 percent from five years ago.
It’s difficult to imagine that trend reversing, so better to “chop the chicken’s head off now,” said Donahoe.
Ben Franklin is rolling over in his grave…
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