You might find this article by Kevin Kosar at RealClearPolicy on the financial woes of the United States Post Office informative:
About $8.8 billion — that is how much the U.S. Postal Service lost in the past year. That is an eye-popping number. The agency is also carrying $11 billion in debt and has more than $120 billion in funded pension and health liabilities.
To be sure, some of that deficit is due to actuarial factor. For example, USPS’s workers’ compensation charge was $3.5 billion last year — much higher than usual due to a change in the way this expense is computed. But even if one wipes away this expense and other “uncontrollable costs,†the U.S. Postal Service still lost $3.4 billion.
The USPS doesn’t just have one problem it has many. Its former business model is being eroded and, when you’re dealing with an employee list and retired employee list as vast as the USPS’s, even small changes in things you can’t control, like interest rates and health care expenses, can be enormously expensive.
USPS is pre-funding their pension plan out 75 years to the tune of $5 Billion /year, that’s a big chunk of the losses. What the hell are we going to DO about old people?