Link: The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse - BusinessWeek

“I really believe that the USPS is going to get to a point where, regardless of what it does with the prefunding [of retiree health care], it is going to implode,” says R. Richard Geddes, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University. “It is either going to default on those obligations to its retirees or we are going to have to give it a direct bailout from the United States taxpayers.”

The implosion could happen this year because of the stalemate in D.C. Maybe that’s what it will take for Americans to get a modern mail service. Even Donahoe, who advocates something less, sounds as if he would welcome it because there’s no other way out. “Some people say if you crash the system,” he says, “then people will pay attention to you.”

My mother and my grandmother survive off of retirement benefits they get from my mom’s many years working as a postal employee. Which is just to say: this means more to me than a potential decrease in junk mail.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if we’re closer than we want to admit to the kind of future the survivalists are describing.