Congress can save our U.S. Postal Service. It won't be a bailout because the current insolvency of the Postal Service is not due to lack of profit or money-grubbing workers. It's due to the dirty trick the 2006 Congress pulled with the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act.
What a fancy name for a setup. We are being had, folks. We are losing our Reno distribution center and its 292 jobs, branches and Saturday delivery just so the U.S. Postal Service can be bankrupted and replaced in private hands.
The act hamstrings the USPS with a requirement to fund the health care coverage for future retirees for 75 years and do it in a 10-year window. That's just nuts, unless the plan is to bankrupt the Postal Service. It requires an annual payment of $5.5 billion. The Postal Service was meeting that totally unnecessary 10-year burden until 2007.
Once the Postal Service is bankrupted, we will have to start using the private-mail delivery industry, which certainly doesn't have the same burden.
Tell Congress to fix this by passing bipartisan bill H.R. 1351. We need to keep our USPS and jobs.
Lucie Johnson
Gardnerville
Our current economic and jobs crisis wasn't created overnight and won't be solved overnight. We must solve the jobs crisis and rebuild the economy the American way, based on balance, fairness and the same set of rules for everyone from Wall Street to Main Street.
We cannot restore our economy by outsourcing American jobs, by allowing our infrastructure to continue to erode, or by allowing reckless financial deals that undermine job creation and retirement security.
Newly elected Rep. Mark Amodei should put country before party and support President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act. This sensible plan contains ideas that have been supported by both Democrats and Republicans for many years.
The American Jobs Act will put more people back to work, put more money in the pockets of working Americans, and it would do so without adding a dime to the deficit. That sounds like good policy to me.
Danny Costella
Carson City