Gutless Wonders and the USPS

The United States Postal Service is planning on punishing the people it serves because it is fiscally incompetent.  The USPS plans to reduce Saturday delivery to packages beginning in August 2013.  This is not the first time the fiscally incompetent have chosen to reduce services rather than address the problem.  California politicians regularly threaten cuts to police and fire departments to get tax increases that will support a bloated and inefficient union bureaucracy.  The same thing is happening to the USPS.  They are reducing services to the people paying for it because they cannot stand up to the unions who have increased compensation to the point of insolvency,

The postal service has lost revenue due to the information age and yet has stayed away from the very technology that could save it (If it would also pay a competitive wage package, which is inconceivable under the thumb of the unions).  The post office should be working on a way to deliver everything electronically.  The bulk of the mail (junk), could be delivered by the USPS to a secure, physical address based, web based mail box.  Everything printed is digitally prepared anyway.  People could opt in or out of digital delivery and the post office could stop the horribly inefficient task of running to millions of homes of day with bits of paper destined for landfills.

Instead, they keep the same model little removed from the previous century.  They do this because they and the Congress are gutless wonders when it comes to challenging the ultimate authority:  The Postal Workers Union.  We pay the price.   

Addendum:
A day after I wrote about politicians threatening vital service cuts unless taxes are increased, the following came from Los Angeles about a proposed tax increase:   Villaraigosa said: “We cut a third of the Los Angeles civilian general fund budget. We’ve had consolidations of departments, we found efficiencies. We’ve done everything that we can. When you look at the kinds of tough decisions that we’ve made … I can now support a sales tax increase.”  Done everything he can except reduce bloated wages and benefits, which is the bulk of inefficiency in government, but that would mean going against the unions.