Rep. Kristi Noem continues to be all talk and no action on fighting for jobs and South Dakota interests. The United States Postal Service announced yesterday that it will seek closure of 252 of its 487 mail processing centers. That includes two South Dakota facilities, in Rapid City and Huron. I don't have employment figures for the Huron facility, but the Rapid City facility employs 60 people. Nationwide, these cuts will put 28,000 Americans out of work, on top of 30,000 jobs already cut by USPS in the last year and the 144,000 jobs shed since January 2008.
The cuts will also guarantee that your mail will get slower: one-day delivery of regular first-class letters (which now happens 42% of the time) will almost never happen, a downgrade in servicethat means we'll get our mail about as fast as Ben Franklin did in 1775. The cuts may boost big shippers like FedEx and UPS, but it will throw more grit in the wheels of commerce.
Rep. Kristi Noem could stop these cuts. There's a bill floating around Congress right now, HR 1351, that would repeal a simple accounting rule that Congress imposed on the Postal Service five years ago. The bill costs taxpayers nothing. Pass HR 1351, and USPS instantly gets rid of the pension problems that currently threaten its solvency. HR 1351 currently has 227 co-sponsors, including 31 Republicans. Rep. Noem is not among them.
Instead, Rep. Noem takes no action to prevent job losses and increased drag on the economy. Wow: it's almost as if Noem and her fellow Republicans want the recession to return.
p.s.: The USPS cuts will also hit blacks harder than whites.
I am upset with the media for not reporting the source of the problem with the Postal Service. The Postal Accountability & Enhancement Bill (2006) that created this crisis is never mentioned, and the public needs to be informed.
Voters should be urged to contact their Senators and Representatives to tell them to pass HR 1351 which would correct this problem before any more damage it done.