3% Withholding Repeal and Job Creation Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, there are two issues I would like to touch upon this afternoon which I think are significantly important to the people of our country.

On Sunday, 2 days ago, I held a town meeting in Montpelier, VT, on the issue of saving the Postal Service. Frankly, I was stunned by the number of people who came. As you know, Vermont is not the largest State in the Nation, and yet we had about 350 people crowding into the cafeteria at Montpelier High School to say very clearly that they do not want to see the Postal Service dismembered. They do not want to see policies develop that will create a death spiral for the post offices of America.

We heard a lot of testimony from many people, and the bottom line is that everybody in that room thought it was terribly wrong that in the midst of a recession the post office is talking about cutting 120,000 good-paying jobs in our country. It didn't make sense to anybody in that room.

I find it ironic that at a moment when, appropriately enough--and I strongly support the effort--we are talking about creating jobs for veterans who are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, with high unemployment rates, many of the people who work in the post office are, in fact, veterans. On one hand, we are trying to create jobs for veterans; on the other hand, if the Postal Service does what it wants, we may end up losing 120,000 jobs, including many veterans.

I wanted to touch on some of the important issues that I think we have to deal with regarding the Postal Service. I want to just go over a letter that Senators Leahy, Gillibrand, Wyden, and myself sent to the chairpeople and ranking members of the Committee on Homeland Security and the subcommittee as well; that is, Senators Lieberman, Collins, Carper, and Scott Brown. These are the points we made in the letter. These are points that will be incorporated into legislation that I will be introducing this week--legislation that I think is commonsense legislation, legislation that will help us create a business model so the Postal Service can be successful, legislation that will save 120,000 jobs.

This is what we wrote in the letter to the Homeland Security Committee. A lot of people don't know this. They say correctly that the Postal Service is having problems because we are in a digital age, and first class mail is going down because people are e-mailing. That is true.

Second, we are in the midst of a recession and many businesses are facing problems. But the most important financial problems facing the post office today are not those issues; they are the issues of accounting approaches that have done great disservice to the Postal Service.

The U.S. Postal Service uniquely has been forced to prefund 75 years' worth of future retiree health benefits in just 10 years. There is no other agency of government that comes close to that onerous requirement, nor do we believe there are any companies in the private sector that have been asked to do that. We are asking the Postal Service to come up with a huge amount of money and put it into a fund in a way that no other agency of government--and we think no other private company--has been forced to do.

This mandate costs the Postal Service between $5.4 billion and $5.8 billion per year, and it accounts for 100 percent of the Postal Service's $20 billion debt. Without that onerous requirement, the USPS would still have significant borrowing authority with the U.S. Treasury to ride out the tough economic times we are seeing in the recession.

Furthermore, it is not only future retiree health benefits they are being asked to come up with and fund, but the USPS needs to recoup the overpayments it has made to the CSRS and FERS, the Federal retirement system. According to studies by the Hay Group and the Segal Company, USPS has overpaid the CSRS by between $50 billion and $75 billion. If we look at those two issues, if we can deal with those issues and treat the Postal Service fairly, we will have gone a very long way toward addressing the immediate financial crisis the Postal Service is facing.

Second, what we want to be very careful about as we develop business models for the future is to not start cutting, cutting, cutting, and creating a Postal Service that will no longer have customer support and lay the groundwork for literally a death spiral and the destruction and demise of the Postal Service in years to come.

I come from a rural State. Post Offices are extremely important to the people of small towns above and beyond getting mail. They become, in a sense, in some ways, the identifying feature of a small town. It is where people come together and talk. It is very important, in my mind, that we not start cutting pell-mell hundreds and hundreds of small post offices in rural America. I think the legislation we will be offering this week addresses that

problem in a sensible and reasonable way.

Second of all, the Postal Service can never be competitive if when you drop a letter into a postal box it takes 5 days for that letter to get to its destination. One of the ideas that the Postal Service is talking about is making very significant cuts in what they call processing centers. That is where the mail is gathered and forwarded. If we cut those centers--in my State, we have two that are on the line, Essex Junction and Wright River Junction. If we cut those and other processing centers all over the country, what will happen is that when we drop that letter into a mailbox, it could take up to 5 days for that letter to reach its destination. When we have that poor service, people are simply going to stop using the post office, and that continues the death spiral. People are not going to want to use the service.

Thirdly, and in the same vein, the Postal Service is now talking about cutting Saturday delivery. Again, that means there are a whole lot of folks who get prescription drugs on Saturday, and a whole lot of people who get a magazine or newspapers on Saturday--if we cut that back, people are going to say: No, I don't want to deal with the post office anymore. It is not worth it.

So it seems to me the choice we have is to do what the Postal Service is now talking about; that is, cut and eliminate rural post offices, end Saturday mail delivery, cut and eliminate significant numbers of processing centers, which will slow down the delivery of mail--that is one approach--and lay off, by the way, some 120,000 American workers, including many veterans. That is a very bad idea.

The other approach is to come up with a business model that recognizes that we are in the 21st century; that the post office has to evolve and change and give the post office the freedom to compete in a way that addresses the needs of its customers. I will give an example.

The Presiding Officer comes from a rural State, as I do. A lot of people in our States want to get fishing licenses or hunting licenses. If they walked into a post office in rural New Hampshire or rural Vermont and said: Hey, can I fill out an application to get a fishing or hunting license, the post office would say they we don't do that, they are not permitted to do that.

If an individual literally wants to walk into a post office--and postmasters tell me this happens every day--and say: I have a letter, and I want it notarized, they may be a notary public, but they are not allowed by law to notarize that.

The issue of the digital revolution is obviously impacting post offices not only in the United States but around the world. Other countries are looking at these challenges in a way that we are not. I will give one more example.

For a lot of reasons--legal and otherwise--there are people who would like to see a document delivered to somebody in writing and not simply in e-mail. There are post offices now in other countries where one can send an e-mail, say, from Vermont to California, it gets printed, and on the same day that document gets delivered to a business or a home. The post office in America is not allowed to do that. So by law our post office is restricted from entering the 21st century.

If somebody walks into a post office now and says they want to print up 10 copies of a document, so where is the copying machine, the postmaster would say they don't have one, that they are not allowed to have a copy machine.

There are a lot of ideas out there that people are talking about as to how the Postal Service can address the needs of customers in the 21st century.

Last, but not least, on this issue, one of the people at the town meeting on Sunday got up and said: I want to say this. In our town, we know our letter carrier very well. Our letter carrier noticed that mail remained in the mail box of an elderly person, and the mailman got on the phone and called the police department because he suspected that something was wrong.

It turns out that something was wrong and that person's life was saved. I expect that happens all over this country. We have hundreds of thousands of letter carriers who know people, interact with people. They do play and can more so play an important role in providing services.

Bottom line, Madam President, I think it is a bad idea in the midst of a recession to slash 120,000 jobs, including jobs of many of our veterans. Second, I do believe if we use our brains and entrepreneurial spirit, we can create a post office that is very relevant and can be profitable in the 21st century.

We will be introducing legislation addressing all of these issues, and I hope very much that my colleagues will cosponsor that legislation.

TAX FAIRNESS

Madam President, there is another issue I want to talk about, and that is the work of the supercommittee. This country has a recordbreaking deficit. It has a $14-plus trillion national debt, and I think all of the American people--or virtually all--want to see the supercommittee come up with a proposal which makes sense and which helps us address our deficit crisis. My suggestion to the supercommittee is that they, in fact, can do that by simply doing what the American people want them to do.

I have heard some of the ideas out there, where members of the supercommittee are talking about cutting Social Security, which has not contributed one nickel to our deficit and has a $2 1/2 trillion surplus, and another idea being that we have to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Well, we have 50 million people without any health insurance. I don't think it is a brilliant idea to throw more and more people off health insurance. So I think those are bad ideas, and every single poll I have seen tells me the American people agree those are dumb ideas.

Meanwhile, I have seen and talked to a whole lot of people who are asking me this question: How is it, when the wealthiest people in this country are becoming much wealthier, when the effective tax rates of the top 2 percent are the lowest in decades, that we are not asking those people who are doing phenomenally well to start paying their fair share of taxes?

This is not just a progressive idea and it is not just a Democratic idea. The polls suggest that all across the political spectrum, the American people are saying: Yes, it is right and appropriate that the wealthiest people in this country start paying their fair share of taxes.

I will just mention an ABC News-Washington Post October 5, 2011, poll reflecting that 75 percent of Independents support raising taxes on millionaires. In that same poll, 57 percent of Republicans support raising taxes on millionaires. In that same poll, 55 percent of tea party supporters--supposedly the extreme rightwing who want to abolish Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, which turns out not to be the case at all--agree with raising taxes on millionaires. According to a June 2011 Washington Post poll, 72 percent of Americans support raising taxes on incomes over $250,000.

So I think we know what the American people want. They do not want, in poll after poll, to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because they know how vitally important those programs are to the well-being of tens of millions of Americans. For example, according to a February 2011 NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, 77 percent of Americans are opposed to cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit.

So where are we as a country? We are pretty united. We are in agreement. What the American people are saying is that the rich are getting richer, their effective real tax rates have gone down, and they have to pay more in taxes to help us through deficit reduction and to create jobs.

The American people also understand there are huge corporate loopholes out there, with oil companies making money hand over fist and getting huge tax breaks and Wall Street getting huge tax breaks. We lose $100 billion a year because large companies and the wealthy put their money into tax havens in the Cayman Islands, in Bermuda, and in Panama. The people of this country know that is wrong.

I hope very much that the supercommittee will do nothing more than listen to the American people. That is all. If they do that, they will do the right thing. They will not suggest that we cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but they will suggest that the wealthiest people in this country start paying their fair share of taxes. They will recommend that we do away with these outrageous loopholes large profitable corporations enjoy. If they do that, we will, in fact, come up with an agreement that will help us reduce the deficit, and we will win the support of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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