How Prefunding Retiree Health Benefits Impacts the Postal Service’s Bottom Line – and How Brookings Got it Wrong

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Yves Smith

Yves here. The ongoing effort to eliminate or considerably degrade the level of service provided by the Postal Service, to the benefit of UPS and Fedex, is moving along at a slow enough pace so as to largely escape the attention that it deserves.

This post goes through the detail of how numbers are being cooked to aid in the campaign against the Postal Service. Angry Bear writer run75441 catches a Reinhart/Rogoff level error on a computational level in a recent Brookings paper by Elaine Kamarck that argued for a radical dismembermemt of the Postal Service. Worse, she misrepresents her own data to make the claim that the apparent woes of the Postal Service are fundamental, and not the result of the unheard-of retiree prefunding obligations imposed on the Postal Service.