On the recordFebruary 5, 2020
I thank my colleague from North Carolina. I agree with my colleague from North Carolina, let us not confuse what we are talking about here today. I very much appreciate the postal employees who deliver the mail to my house. When I go into a post office and need to mail things, they are wonderful people and give great service. That is not the issue here. The issue is: Are we going to fund, properly, the retirement and healthcare services? I am not necessarily opposed to addressing the United States Postal Service's requirement to prefund its retiree health benefits. Doing so, though, in this manner would be disastrous for the American taxpayer. This bill's elimination of the prefunding requirement without instituting any reforms to tackle its fiscal status, as my colleague has said, would simply mean that Congress continues to play the game of kicking the can down the road. The fact is that there is already a long history of public retirement accounts that have either dramatically cut retiree benefits or had to rely on a taxpayer bailout as a result of not fully prefunding their plans. This is a snowball going down the hill that is going to pick up steam. The only way to pay off the unfunded liabilities created by the U.S. post office retiree health benefits--without enacting cost-saving reform to the U.S. Postal Service, which this bill does not--would be a taxpayer bailout.…
