Thread by @BillPascrell

My @USPS explainer thread:

📬Handles 47% world’s mail
📦Ships ~150 billion ✉️/yr
🚚Delivers more in 16 days than UPS+FedEx ship combined in a yr
👩🏾👦🏼500,000 career employees
🏢31,000 locations

You can send a ✉️ from Key West ➡️ Utqiagvik AK for less than the cost of a candy bar

No surprise then that Americans rank the post office maybe the most popular arm of government. A 2018 Pew poll found 88% of Americans have a positive view of @USPS.

Try to find something else in our government 88% of Americans support.

The post office birthed a 2nd American revolution. USPS precipitated road building & allowed people to fan out across the land. Postal contracts sustained transcontinental 🚂. It was the post that got the govt to invest in aviation & birth commercial ✈️ .
uspsoig.gov/sites/default/…

The post has been an agent of upward social mobility. When the US bureaucracy finally desegregated, African Americans joined USPS & by the 1920s made up 15-30% of postal employees. @USPS has been one of the foremost incubators of the black middle class.
postalmuseum.si.edu/research-artic…

Most Americans don’t know that @USPS receives effectively *no* support from the federal budget.

Forcing USPS to prefund its health care benefits at least *50 years in advance* accounts for almost all its losses since 2006. That's why USPS is in the red.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-p…

The gop has been sabotaging USPS for decades. The 2006 law was designed to! The House voted 309-106 to repeal but Mcconnell is blocking it.

@USPS will die wo/ immediate help & ending prefunding.

This thread is from my @monthly essay which you should read!
#SaveThePostOffice

https://twitter.com/BillPascrell/status/1115319444413276167