Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted the notion of giving the U.S. Postal Service any more taxpayer money during an interview on Wednesday after it has lost approximately $78 billion from 2007 through 2019.
“Well, anybody who wants to give money to the post office, you might as well just put it into a big pile on your front lawn and burn it,” Paul told Fox News during an interview. “There’s no way to give any money to the post office to make the post office redeemable. You cannot fix the post office unless you fix their labor problem. 80 percent of the cost of the post office is labor. About 50 percent of UPS’ cost are labor. And FedEx is about 38 percent.”
“You can’t run a business with 80 percent of your costs being labor, when your competitors have much lower costs,” Paul continued. “So, really, in the end, just giving money to the post office is giving money to an operation that lost $8 billion last year. So, giving them $10 billion, it’ll be gone within a year’s time. It’s a foolhardy notion. And, when they call it skinny, to me, it’s just Democrat-lite. And I didn’t run for office to be just slightly less bad than the Democrats.”
“The only way I’d give the post office any money would be to have a hiring freeze, and they would have to gradually lower their employment significantly,” Paul later added. “There’s a third less overall mail going through the post office in the last 14 years. They need to have a third less employees. A few years ago, they started, through attrition, mainly by letting the older employees not be replaced. They were getting smaller. But they’ve actually started growing again in the last year or two.”
“If you look at the costs, even though the numbers of employees haven’t gone up, the costs are still going through the roof because of the pension being so expensive. So, really, without a mandate to make it a smaller organization, you shouldn’t give them any money,” Paul said. “So, it’s sort of like when you do rescue a company that’s failing, they have to have reforms. Nobody comes in with venture capital and just says, ‘Hey, here’s a bucket of money. Keep losing money.’ They tell you, you have to change. So, it’s a real mistake to give the post office money unless they significantly reform their ways.”
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