USPS - Loosing $2.4 Million per Hour

From the LA Times article...

The U.S. Postal Service reported a $15.9 billion USD annual loss today.

Its largest loss ever.

This after missing a number of multi-billion dollar pension payments.

Interestingly the USPS has also reached its "borrowing limit."

What this implies is that not only is the agency losing money but its also borrowed ($15 billion USD - its limit) as well.  Add in the missed retiree payments (about $10 billion USD) and you have a total loss on the surface of about $40 billion USD (assuming that they never pay back their borrowing limit which seems likely given the steep drop in mail volume).

The larger US government at its $9.6 billion per day spending rate spends this much in four days.

According to the LA Times that's a loss rate of $2.4 million USD per hour.

The USPS exists because of the US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 known as the "Postal Clause or the Postal Power".  This empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads".

Note that the government is not required by the Constitution to have a Post Office.

There are some 500,000 employees of the USPS today plus countless retirees.  If you count all the vendors, suppliers and so forth there are probably another 500,000 people involved in some way, shape or form.

One might consider that the USPS has a lot of assets and collateral for these losses but if you think about it today's iPhone user probably has little use for bar code sprayers, letter sorters, and so on.

According to the same LA Times article the USPS is confident "Congress" will solve their problem.

I guess we had better up the daily US government borrowing rate from $3.6 billion USD...