> No other company has to do this. They created this rule specifically to make the USPS run at a loss so they would have a reason to gut it. This is a great re

> No other company has to do this. They created this rule specifically to make the USPS run at a loss so they would have a reason to gut it. This is a great reason to not get your news from John Oliver, as everything you have said in this comment is false (except I'm sure the link works). "Prefunding" a retirement account is the only way a private retirement account is ever funded. Normal people call it "set aside" or "fund". The alternative is to 1) not have a retirement benefit, 2) a social security pay-as-you-go system, which is not legal for any private company to have. In a pay-as-you-go system, there is no pension fund but workers get paid benefits from the company's general revenue. You can understand why that may be legal for the government, but not a private business (which can go bust). Private businesses are forced to set aside money for retirement benefits as the liabilities accrue. Obviously this creates a pain point when an arm of the government is privatized. But that doesn't mean we allow private companies to pay pensions out of general revenue just because they used to be public in the past. Even those companies which no longer offer defined benefit plans but only make some 401K contributions still make those contributions to a fund in the worker's name each year, before the worker retires. They "prefund". All private companies "prefund". Have you heard of the phrase "pension fund"? That's the fund into which companies must make payment ahead of retirement when a worker is working and then the worker draws those down when he retires. Forcing companies to set those funds aside ahead of time for each worker is how we fight the temptation to skimp on those contributions and kick the can down the road. Companies that do skimp on pension fund contributions are committing fraud and this creates a big mess as the government has to bail them out or workers end up not getting their retirement checks. What's interesting is where this misinformation came from as it's so popular on the left. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories about "gutting" the post office, but what I think is the key problem is the refusal to acknowledge there might be a tension between the generous retirement benefits negotiated by the postal workers union and the fact that the post office is facing financial shortfalls. And instead of acknowledging these real trade offs, it is some supposed unfair accounting rule that is causing problems for the post office and not, you know, all the money they are promising to pay workers when they retire.