Written by Ron Bloom for Huffington Post
For the third quarter of its 2012 fiscal year, the United States Postal Service reported a net loss of $5.2 billion and projected continuing large losses and “very low levels of cash” for the remainder of the fiscal year. With that came news that the Postal Service had failed to make a $5.5 billion dollar payment to the Treasury Department. An additional $5.6 billion payment was missed today.
This report and the missed payments fed the narrative of the Postal Service as a dying institution, hopelessly ill-equipped to adapt to the digital age, with the inevitable government bailout at taxpayer expense soon at hand.
Yet the Postal Service could have instead chosen to report that its operating revenue was stable and that its operating losses were smaller than forecast and improved from the same period last year. And they could have also pointed out that the decline in first-class mail volume and revenue was smaller than expected and that Shipping Services achieved dramatic record growth.
Why this disconnect?
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