Killing useful institutions by demagoguery

Red Tape - Twisted government accounting behind Postal Service woes: "Perhaps you heard that the Postal Service couldn't pay $5.5 billion bill that came due Sept. 30 and that only an emergency postponement saved it from the government's equivalent of default.
In fact, it's the Postal Service that’s currently bailing out the U.S. government. Politicians have been raiding Postal Service revenues for years, using them to make the federal deficit appear smaller than it really is. The fiscal gyrations are so twisted that the Postal Service is right now forced to pre-pay health care benefits for employees the agency hasn't even hired yet — in fact, for many future employees who haven't even been born yet — all to artificially shrink the federal deficit.
It's these crushing accounting tricks, not the cost of delivering mail, that has pushed this 200-year-old institution to the brink.
Welcome to the wacky world of Washington, D.C., accounting."

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