File this under the category, “Who woulda thought …”

In the article A Manufactured ‘Crisis’: Congress Can Let The Post Office Save Itself Without Mass Layoffs Or Service Reductions, we have:

Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits.

This is so obvious that it goes without saying, right?  Oh wait, “major media coverage” is a dead give away.  What if the obvious weren’t so true?  Here is the rest of that paragraph or two:

While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

Who would have thought that Congress would purposely sabotage a quasi-government program just to prove that government doesn’t work?

H.R. 6407: Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act

109th Congress: 2005-2006

I wonder if the Democrats realized what a booby trap was in the bill?