Love My Country, Loathe My Government: Post Office

Showing posts with label Post Office. Show all posts

Friday, June 26, 2026

June, 2026, Political Class Insanity: More Chicago Carnage, Mamdani's Ideas Continue to Fail, A Loan Sharking NJ Councilman, and The Post Office Financial Death Spiral

We have spent a lot of our recent posts about which state or city will go bankrupt first and the massive fraud that has been going on relative to government programs. But that does not mean that the potential class has been up to its traditional incompetence, insanity, and screw ups. So, let’s catch up with the shenanigans that continue to plague the country:

1)We have previously discussed the reality that the Post Office is in serious financial trouble. Over the past few decades the volume of first class mail pieces has decreased from about 220 million first class mail pieces a year to about 110 million a year. It is obvious to anyone with a just a bit of common sense that the Post Office has been hurtling towards bankruptcy and something has to be done to prevent that.

But over the decades the Washington political class has done nothing to resolve the financial problems facing the Post Office, so much so that this is where we find ourselves today:

If nothing had been done, the Post Office was going to run out of cash for operations by 2027.
The good news is that the day of reckoning has been delayed to 2031 or so.
The bad news is that the Post Office management has stopped making payments into their employees’ retirement funds, endangering the retirement payments to retiring/retired Post Office employees.
Thus, just to keep operating, the Post Office is using employee retirement funds to keep afloat, a tactic that only delays the inevitable financial disaster.
According to the Postmaster General: "What we are doing right now is we're basically borrowing money from our retirement plans to fund current operations. I'm not particularly comfortable with that. I promise you our employees are not particularly comfortable with that. You all shouldn't be comfortable with that. None of us should be comfortable with that. To me, that's why we have to have this discussion of how we fix this broken business model."
The Post Office lost a whopping $2 billion in this fiscal year’s second quarter after losing $9 billion last year.

The Post Office business model is certainly now in the decline stage of its life cycle. Drastic, courageous action is needed by the political class to develop and deploy a new business model. Whether it is restricting the number of days it delivers mail, consolidating Post Office locations to save on real estate and utility costs, etc. something has to be done. The mail volume will continue to decrease, expenses will continue to go up, that is reality and denying that reality makes the end result even worse.

Unfortunately, as we all know, the American politicians always have neither the ability, the foresight, or courage to take the drastic actions needed to resolve any problem facing the country. Including changing the business model of postal operations.

Side note: I have been doing a little survey of mail deliveries on my own. Over the past four days, I have received 21 pieces of mail. Seventeen of those mail pieces were advertisements for tree pruning, auto sales, real estate sales, and other business advertisements. Only four pieces of mail were non-advertising and important in my life. Whether I got those advertisements today or tomorrow would make no difference in my life.

My point: given how much less important mail we all receive these days, it would probably not be a hardship if the Post Office not only dropped Saturday delivery but could probably drop Tuesday and Thursday deliveries also. A day delay in getting that auto deal advertisement is not a big deal. Restricting mail delivery days would greatly reduce costs and give the Post Office some financial breathing room.

But to think that our politicians in Washington have the courage to restrict the number of delivery days, or do anything else needed to fix what is broken, is just wishful thinking.

2)One would hope that those elected to serve the citizens in their government entity would be of the highest honor and integrity. Unfortunately, that is not often the case, as illustrated by a recent situation in New Jersey:

A New Jersey sitting councilman was recently arrested for allegedly running a loansharking operation out of his council office.
Yes, running an illegal criminal enterprise out of his government office, unreal.
Councilman John Alite, of Englishtown was arrested and charged with theft by extortion, corporate misconduct, usury, and terroristic threats.
He was arrested with another gentleman who was allegedly his partner in running a loan shark racket.
They are accused of making loans at so-called "extreme rates” and threatened loan recipients with violent acts to force repayment, a classic organized crime loansharking approach.
But these allegation maybe should not surprise us since 15 years ago he received a 10 year prison sentence on racketeering charges and yet still ended up being a high ranking city government official.
He supposedly had ties to the Gambino crime family and notorious gangster, John Gotti Jr.

Obviously these two gentlemen are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But if the allegations are true, it really makes you wonder how broken our political processes are if someone with a long criminal record can get elected and yet continue those criminal activities out of a taxpayer funded office.

3)We have not been a fan of New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, since he was elected. His ideas of government border on communism and we know from history that communism is a failed style of governance that is not conducive to freedom and a high quality of life.

But that does not mean he has not promised a high quality of life for his citizens. He has proposed "free" day care, “free” bus service, and greatly reduced grocery prices in government run grocery stores. Of course,”free” is a misleading adjective since someone is going to have to pay for all of his “free” services and that someone is the city taxpayer who will be taxed at a higher and higher rate to fund his ideas.

But these ideas have previously failed miserably around the country and around the world. Government run grocery stores in the Soviet Union and communist eastern Europe were disasters with minimal product offerings at high prices. His idea to operate government run, reduced priced grocery stores was tried and failed in Kansas City. The city lost $18 million of taxpayer wealth trying to implement Mamdani’s government grocery idea which failed miserably in just a single store location.

And Kansas City, which tried to implement another of Mamdani’s communist concepts, has another failure on its hands:

Kansas City attempted to operate a city bus system where there was no charge to those using the bus system, much like the concept Mamdani wants to implement in New York City.
But the city politicians recently abandoned the idea and started charging people bus fares once they found out that they could not afford this “free” service.
The Kansas City “free” bus service started back in 2020.
The concept of “free” bus service operated for a while but was surviving financially because of Covid relief dollars that flowed to the city and its bus operations under the Biden regime.
However, once the Federal government source of those funds dried up it became obvious that the free service could not survive without huge government subsidies.
Thus, the city’s politicians were faced with a brutal choice: greatly reduce bus service until the city government could afford to provide free service or start charging again for bus ridership.
The original forecasted cost of suspending charging for bus fares was estimated at $8.8 million a year but the real cost of “free” bus service actually came in at almost double the cost or about $15 million a year, $15 million that city taxpayers were going to have to pay to keep the “free” service.

A failed concept that has a proven track record of failure and yet, Mamdani is still pressing ahead with the idea. The cost of Kansas City’s “free” bus failure is likely tiny compared to the massively larger bus service that New York City would try to make free and probably fail doing. A failure in New York City would not be a mere $15 million but orders of magnitude higher, which again, would eventually require massive cuts to service or the eventual return to bus fares, exactly what happened in Kansas City.

And for a city facing larger and larger structural budget shortfalls in the coming years, it is unknown and doubtful if Mamdani could find the additional funding that would cover the massive loss of bus fare revenue.

Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This concept obviously is unknown to Mamdani. Government grocery stores have failed many times. Free bus service has already failed in a smaller city that could not support a much smaller bus operation than New York City. Failed concepts that will make a failing financial situation in New York City fail even quicker with no benefit to city residents.

4)The last piece of political class insanity today is just another tragic chapter in the long story of violent insanity from the the city of Chicago:

Despite a new mayor, the violence in the city continues to grind out every day.
During a recent weekend, six residents were shot and killed and another 39 were gunshot wounded.
Unfortunately, this is just another pretty typical example of the constant gun violence in Chicago, violence that the city’s politicians have no clue on how to get under control.

And yet the mayor and the Illinois governor refuse to accept help from the Trump administration to help reduce the violence. They would rather have their citizens die and live in fear than accept help from the President they detest.

Since a very basic tenet of any government entity is to protect the lives and property of the citizens they serve, their Trump Derangement Syndrome is preventing them from executing this basic government entity. And because of their stubbornness, Chicago residents will continue to die unnecessarily.

Enough insanity for today: more carnage in Chicago, Mamdani’s favorite programs are already failures, a loan sharking politician in New Jersey, and the Post office financial death spiral gets worse.

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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:

https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom

**********************

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

Saturday, April 11, 2026

April, 2026, Part 2, Political Class Insanity: California's High Speed Rail Line Is Still Not Running, The Post Office Is Still In Decline, and Minnesota Politicians Still Do Not Understand Economic Principles

We have been spending a lot of time lately dissecting the race to bankruptcy court, i.e. what state government or city government will go bankrupt first. Many Democratic states and cities have already entered into financial death spirals as their taxpayer base erodes but the politicians running these cities and states cannot or will not reduce government spending or make government operations more efficient to cope with the shrinking tax base.

The last two posts on this topic can be found at the following links:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-proof-that.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-race-to-bankruptcy-court-california.html

However, we will take a break from this bankruptcy race and discuss some good old fashioned political class insanity for the next few posts.

1)We have often proven that American politicians are very good at over promising results and delivering results that are either over budget, behind schedule, and sometimes never completed. In the process, massive amounts of taxpayer dollars are wasted for little or no benefit in return.

And out in California there is a government project that hit the trifecta: it is over budget AND behind schedule AND is unlikely to ever get completed:

Long ago California politicians promised to build a modern high speed rail line that would run almost the entire length of the state.
Back in 2008, the state government and the politicians that operated it proposed and approved a plan that would build the high speed rail line for $33 billion and would be operational by 2020.
However, 18 years later, the cost is up to $126 billion and not a single piece of track has been laid yet, six years after the project was supposed to be completed.
The schedule now predicts only a short piece of the plan will be completed by 2033, 25 years after the project was proposed and 13 years after the entire eight of the line would be completed.
Recently, Anthony Williams, a member of the authority overseeing the development of the rail one and who also was governor Gavin Newsom’s former legislative affairs secretary, was interviewed by CBS correspondent Jon Wertheim.
When asked by Wertheim if the money for the project was ever there to complete the project when this whole effort started, Williams actually gave an honest answer: "It wasn't. Let's be real.”
Following up on this confession that the estimated money required was never real, California Transportation Secretary, Toks Omishakin, confessed: "There were mistakes made. Some of the criticisms on this project, I think, are very fair. I don't think the voters fully understood, and neither did we in the public sector, what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered."
In other words, people in charge of the project knew early on and over the years that this project was a farce and yet never told the taxpayers.
For context, the transcontinental railroad was built in the 1860s in six years, it ran 1,776 miles, and ran through 15 tunnels that were blasted through mountains.
The California politicians have built nothing after 18 years and they did not have to blast through mountains.

A failure for the ages: over budget, over due and likely to never be completed, a perfect trifecta failure.

2)We have discussed many, many times relative to our theory that a major city and an entire state government is heading towards bankruptcy court in a relatively short time. One of the common failings of these cities and states is that they continually raise taxes on their residents and businesses. At some point, these residents and businesses pick up and move to other areas where the tax burden is far less.

This out-migration of residents and businesses reduces the tax base which reduces the government tax revenue stream. Rather than reduce government spending or make government programs more efficient, the politicians usually take the easy, and wrong, approach and just raise taxes. This drives more tax dollars out of the state or city and eventually the bankruptcy occurs. As we discussed, this financial death spiral dance is already playing out across the country.

But despite the warnings of what happens when you continually raise taxes, apparently the politicians in Minnesota did not get the message:

Some Democratic politicians in Minnesota have proposed that a wealth tax be imposed on state residents worth over $10 million in total assets..
The wealth tax would be 1% of total wealth, not income.
Thus, someone worth exactly $10 million a year would pay a wealth tax of $100,000 a year, independent of any other state taxes.
Concerns have been raised that this could be a slippery slope that today the threshold is $10 million but once millionaires move out of the state and take all their tax revenue with them that amount could be dropped to $5 million or $1 million, or who knows how low?

Seriously: why would anyone continue to live in Minnesota that was wealthy? We have seen it in California and New York: as the tax burden on the wealthy has gotten higher and higher along with more taxes under consideration on the wealthy, the wealthy simply pick up and leave and move to more favorable financial locations such as Texas and Florida.

And the same phenomenon will happen in Minnesota if this wealth tax idiocy becomes law. People will leave, depriving the state government not only of wealth tax revenue but also state income tax, property tax, sales tax, and economic growth since wealthy people are more likely to spend and expand the state economy. That all goes away when the wealthy leave. The concept is simple but apparently too complicated for the simpleton Minnesota politicians to understand.

3)There are not a lot of projects, programs, and efforts that the American political class operate that actually work efficiently. Medicare is going bankrupt, Social Security is going bankrupt, Medicaid is fraught with fraud and corruption, projects that get started and financed but never get completed (e.g. California high speed rail line), taxes and crime keep going up, many state and city government budgets are in a death spiral because of government overspending and under performance, the list of failures of American politicians sometimes seems endless.

And to this list of government

failures we may have to add the United States Postal System (USPS):

The USPS recently announced that it would temporarily stop making financial contributions to the Federal retirement annuities for USPS employees and retirees.
The USPS needs the cash that is diverted from retirement accounts in order to continue paying for current workers, suppliers, and keep mail deliveries functioning.
The USPS chief financial executive, Luke Grossman, has described the current postal situation as an “ongoing, severe financial crisis.”
He also said that USPS could run out of cash as early as February, 2027 unless severe corrective actions are taken.
Grossman stated that keeping day to day operations going has precedent over long term pension and retirement funding.
As a result, current short term plans call for raising the price of first class mail, post cards, and international mail which in turn will reduce mailing volumes and make the situation worse.
None of this should be a surprise since the financial crisis has been boiling up for decades.
The amount of annual mail volume that was 220 billion pieces in 2006 is now about 110 billion a year now, a 50% decrease.
This has resulted in the operation losing over $18 billion over the past two years.

You have to feel sorry for retired postal workers since it looks like they are the first ones that will suffer the inability of the American political class to fix a problem that has been growing for decades. The industry and business has been in a steep decline for twenty years. It is not going to revive itself, people are paying bills online, they are sending christmas and birthday wishes online, businesses are advertising more and more electronically, first class and other mail options are a dying business.

Personally, I have two observations. First, every time I am out of town for a while and my held mail is delivered, I sort it into two piles: personal mail such as bills, correspondence with friends and family, etc. go into one pile to be counted and advertising pieces of mail, the vast majority of which I never asked to receive, go into another pile. When both piles are counted, consistently 90% or so of mail received is mailings that I could do without. My life would actually be simpler since almost all of the non-personal mail I receive has to be walked over to the recycling bin.

And second, the service provided by at least my local post office has been pretty atrocious lately. The mail piece I send out never gets delivered to the addressee. Mail pieces sent to me never get delivered. Mail pieces mailed four weeks ago via first class mail finally get delivered. I have gone out of my way to avoid dealing with my local post office, even traveling to the next town over whenever I have to mail something of importance.

The bottom line to my mail experience is that I do not want to pay more and more for a government service that does less and less in an inefficient and sloppy way, a service that is in severe decline. Go to an everyday other mail delivery calendar (e.g. who cares if the car dealership ad shows up two days later than usual), shut down low performing and unnecessary post office locations, etc. Nothing is going to reverse the declining market for post office services, best to reduce the bloat, reduce the taxpayer expense and let it eventually die a natural death like other products and services have done throughout history.

But we know that will not happen. The political class will wait until the situation hits a severe crisis mode and then will act hastily and irrationally due to the time crisis which always means the taxpayer will pay more and get less benefit.

That will do it for today' s insanity: the USPS continues to implode with no plan to fix it, Minnesota politicians’ economic ignorance and stupidity, and the California high speed rail line is still not up and running.

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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:

https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom

**********************

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at: