pacino wrote:i just checked out her website. she sounds like an idiot.

jerseyhoya wrote:

pacino wrote:i just checked out her website. she sounds like an idiot.

LePen or Mia Love?

If LePen, of course she sounds like an idiot, she's a fascist.

If Love, I just want us to have a Haitian female congresswoman. Don't really care if she's smart or not.

But the assumption that the Postal Service is an uncompetitive basket case requires closer examination. The Postal Service has been crippled by a series of accounting rulings that have imposed enormous penalties on it ever since it was first established as a government-run company (as opposed to a government agency) in the early '70s.

The initial sin was the division of pension liabilities between the new company and government for its workforce at the time it became independent. A fair division of liabilities would have implied that a private buyer would have paid neither more nor less for the Postal Service due to its remaining pension liabilities.

As the deal went down, the Postal Service was stuck with a large portion of the liabilities that were effectively accrued prior to its establishment as an independent company. Independent auditors put the hit to the postal service in the range of $50-$75 billion. That would cover the cumulative losses of the system over the last decade several times over.

The second accounting hit to the Postal Service is the restriction that it can only invest its pension in government bonds, rather than the stocks and other assets held by private pension funds. Since bonds provide a considerably lower rate of return on average, this means the Postal Service must put aside much more money to offer the same pension as a private competitor like UPS.

The difference in returns is a big deal. If the Postal Service will need to pay $20 billion in pensions in 30 years, it would have to put aside roughly $2 billion this year using the rate of return assumption that private pensions had traditionally used. On the other hand, it would have to put aside almost $4 billion using the assumed rate of return on government bonds. The restriction that the pension can only invest in government bonds is a very serious handicap for the Postal Service.

Finally, in 2006 Congress decided that the Postal Service had to rapidly pre-fund its retirement health benefits. The extent of prefunding required by this measure vastly exceeds the level of prefunding for retiree benefits in any private company in the entire country.

If the explicit intent of Congress was to destroy the Postal Service it would be difficult to envision a more effective route than imposing a huge and arbitrary prefunding burden like this one. If the Postal Service had a more reasonable prefunding requirement and were allowed to invest its pension in the same way as private companies, it would have run a profit over the last decade.

pacino wrote:

The second accounting hit to the Postal Service is the restriction that it can only invest its pension in government bonds, rather than the stocks and other assets held by private pension funds. Since bonds provide a considerably lower rate of return on average, this means the Postal Service must put aside much more money to offer the same pension as a private competitor like UPS.

The difference in returns is a big deal. If the Postal Service will need to pay $20 billion in pensions in 30 years, it would have to put aside roughly $2 billion this year using the rate of return assumption that private pensions had traditionally used. On the other hand, it would have to put aside almost $4 billion using the assumed rate of return on government bonds. The restriction that the pension can only invest in government bonds is a very serious handicap for the Postal Service.

pacino wrote:no. you cant have it both ways. either let them operate like an actual business, or convert them to an agency. i would do the latter as i view them as infrastructure.

way to avoid the topic, though.

Alex Moe ‏ @AlexNBCNews
Newt tells @NBCNews if he doesn't win or come close in DE tomorrow he'll take a "deep look" at why still in race & would "reassess" campaign

pacino wrote:Mitt Romney admitted that when his family went to El Paso from Mexico thy his family was helped by the government to get on his feet.

Welfare!!!!