More Layoffs : USPS may close 1,000 post offices

The U.S. Postal Service is studying roughly 1,000 of its 37,000 post offices for possible closure — the latest cost-cutting step from an agency scrambling to deal with a projected $7 billion deficit this year and larger losses in 2010.

The agency started its review earlier this year with approximately 3,200 post offices, and decided about 1,000 of them are “candidates for further review.” Postal managers say they will consider several factors in deciding whether to close those facilities: mail volume, proximity to other post offices and the potential savings in labor and utility costs.

Post offices generate about 71 percent of the Postal Service’s revenues each year; the rest comes through alternative channels, particularly the Postal Service’s Web site.
“Each year more and more postal transactions are now accomplished online,” said Jordan Small, the Postal Service’s acting vice president for network operations. “We consider this a success ... [but we need] to determine if there is, indeed, excess capacity in the network.”Full Story

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Federal tax revenues plummeting

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.

The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.

Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession's impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.

The last time the government's revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.

"Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made," said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.Full Story