The basic problem is really coming up with a bill that will able to get a majority of support within the house and senate and it seems to me that i think they may be getting close to that. As far as getting a more privatestyle of management, it is the sort of a tough not the they are trying to crack. They have several layers now at the Postal Service. I think what they are trying to do in the house bill is to create the idea that you have more of a private the best type of group of managers that could come in within a couple of years if the financial problems are not resolved by the steps that would be prescribed by the legislation that would perhaps be in the future something that would happen. Host the caller mentioned about unions do union see that as a way of breaking up the unions . Guest certainly, there has been there is a lot of pressure on to reduce the size of the workforce. They have about 500,000 workers. What is in the legislation is in sentence, payments, that would be made to encourage early retirement. They would try to reduce via attrition. At the same time, they also have this problem that they dont want to reduce the actual footprint, the actual Geographic Reach of the post office because that will mean elimination of all these rural post offices. That is really the box they find themselves in. Host with the Holiday Shipping season under way today, were talking about the state of the u. S. Postal service. Alan ota is the Senior Writer with cq roll call. Republican caller, you are on the air. We are listening. Caller i am calling about the hours. They are open from 9 00 until 4 00 for the weekend on saturday three hours. They do not cater to the customer. That would be the first place to start. Thats it. Guest they are talking about may be adjusting the hours. On saturday, they are talking perhaps about maybe not having any deliveries are handling of letters but they would have a Package Services so that maybe they might be able to have longer hours for doing the packages on saturday but not dealing with letters. They are trying to find a way to tailor their services and focus on things that are really bringing in money like these package deliveries. Host nebraska, independent caller caller ive got a couple of comments the postal employee that called in was all right on where he talked about the amount of money that the Postal Service has to put into opm and no other federal agency does it and no other federal agency tries to pay its way like the Postal Service does. If they had part of that money back, they could be right on top of it again plus, we talked about five ordered 83,000 employees right now. That is a lot of employees but if you stop and figure about new addresses they get every day, that is a lot of different places to take the mail. If you stop and look at the price of fuel, when i was in the Postal Service, just a few years ago, we had a 3000 vehicles on the road. I am sure they probably have at least that many now and the speculators and Oil Companies are jabbing it to the federal government and the Postal Service and city governments and everybody else down the line and our military. That is not american at all. Host are you a retired postal caller worker yes, i am. I retired in 2004. Host what kind of pension or retire benham Retirement Benefits you have . Caller they offset my benefits for Social Security. They take out for my insurance that i have. Health insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield and end up with 300 per month the. Is pretty outrageous, isnt it, considering they counted me as having 23 years in there. I was a postmaster when i became legally blind. That is beside the point. You dont get rich off the retirement unless you have been there for a lot of years. Host so after 23 years, what do you get in Social Security . Do they take out for that . Caller s, when you first retire, they are mandated by law mr. Reagan and his troops, when they read it so security in 19831986, they came up with federal employees retirement system. They were wanting to eliminate several services altogether. That was because of the benefits. If you have 1,000 so security retirement for your benefit s. Ts, it would offset your benefits by 1,000 also. Youre supposed to get say 1275 and you get 1,000 worth of Social Security, they reduce your disability retirement by 1,000. Host got it. Caller it doesnt leave you a whole lot oin there. There were a lot of private, wealthy people who cut benefits to the people who are served by them and chop it up. You figure 300 Different Companies are running it, they are not going to be able run it efficiently and Work Together. Guest the caller points out that there is a lot of this dispute that has to do with the sort of basic mathematics of benefits that are going to be owed to the Postal Service workers that will be retiring in the next few years. Really, the crunch time is really going to be over the next 510 years. They are trying to come up with a way of maybe restructuring some of these payments that are required for the Retiree Health care benefits, about 5 billion per year that will be paid and it will be over 50 billion overall. They might restructure that a bit and give it a little breathing room for the next few years so they can provide incentives for early retirements, and some reductions in facilities. And become leqaner and focus on more of the profitmaking businesses and that would allow it to be viable and cover these expenses it has to pay in the years beyond. Host from twitter guest i think thats right. There is a concern. I guess what has been driving the preprepayment requirement is the gloomy perspective will the Postal Service be viable or is it in the middle of something that cannot get out of . Is it going to be able to survive . If it cannot, the lawmakers have decided that it is only prudent they should require some of these prepayments for the liabilities. These liabilities will not kick in 50 or 20 years from now. They will be kicking in within the next few years. What you have with the Postal Service work force is you have a baby boom component of that work force and those baby boomers in the Postal Service work force will be retiring over the next few years. That is the challenge that they face in trying to come up with this compromise. Host usps defaulting on about 11 billion in 2012 alone . Guest right, they have not been able to pay the 5. 5 billion over the last two years to what they are trying to come up with is a plan that will reduce those payments. It will be more than zero but reduce those payments to maybe one or two billion dollars per year and then increase the payments and the out years. The liabilities are based on studies and projections and the liability is there and they want to prefund it. It does not look like either party will support eliminating the prefund requirement but maybe they will give it some breathing room. Theres a chance they can come up with a compromise. Host on airline for democrats, last vegas caller they always talk about closing the post offices on saturday but thats the only day they can get their mail. This should close the offices on monday. These republicans are constantly crowing about the constitution and i dont know what is in there. Maintaining the post office is in the constitution so what we need to do is take a vote in the house of representatives you want the post of us or not . Those who votes no, those districts will not get mail. They send these people to congress to represent them and if they dont want Postal Service, fine. The ones that are costing money in the rural areas, stop delivery to those districts. Guest the caller has a couple of good points. They are talking about eliminating sixday delivery of mail. They could negotiate that in a way that the delivery of mail would continue may be on saturday but maybe they would eliminate it for monday or tuesday. I think tuesday is the one they have been looking at. Whenuse that is a day the usage theres less demand but that is the thinking. The caller makes a good point that while it is great to propose Cutting Services and putting in place base Realignment Closure commission and if you need to slash services or eliminate rural post office, is one thing to propose that but then vote on it and have your name on it and have your local post of is perhaps be affected by that decision, that is a very tough thing for members of congress in either party to do. That could be one of the big impediment to getting this thing passed. Host one more fall phone call from florida, republican column. Caller i want to ask one question. He just mentioned that the amount of employees that the Postal Service has is 500,000 to . Guest yes, indeed. Caller i will change my attitude to the comment i made. When i started at the post of us in 1971, i understood that the post office had never made money. It always lost money and that is before i started in 1971. When i got into the post office, i was in a General Post Office in new york. At that time, they were bringing in electronic eyes and machines and they introduced lsm machines at that time which is a letter sorting machine. It can sort 60 pieces of mail in one minute. There is a lot of manual boxing in the post office. For last seven years, i left in 1978, these machines were billions of dollars of electronics and they were coming in at that time. Sometimes the electronic i could not pick up handwriting that they have improved over the years. At that time, there were several hundred thousand people working in the Postal Service as i understood and for years until about two years ago when they had a big problem and started to cut back and they had these rural post offices with one postmaster for one post office, that did not make sense. Guest the caller puts his finger on one of the interesting facts which is that these postal employees really are almost in some ways a community resource. A machine that is able to read the handwriting and be able to discern how to deal with some of the issues they face in these local post offices almost has to be handled by a human being. There is a lot of pressure to retain those workers and those post offices. I think what we will find it is ultimately what they will pass will preserve a lot of that footprints. Host thank you for being with us. Coming up next, we are turning our attention to Consumer Spending and confidence heading into the black friday weekend and cyber monday. We will be right back. I can remember Barack Obamas speech in 2004 at the Democratic Convention that made him a national figure. Four years later, without that speech, he is not a viable candidate for president. There is a brilliant speech at the cooper union in new york from london. It is a fantastic speech. When he ran for the Senate Barack Obama gave a speech in 2004, he was running for the senate in illinois and he won but Abraham Lincoln lost. When you want to think about Abraham Lincoln in 1860, think about barack obama running for the presidency in 2008 if he had lost the Illinois Senate election, that is the level of National Security were talking about. We profiled historic and modern leaders to show the lessons that can be learned for those who have had the greatest impact on the issues of their time. This is on booktv afterwards at 9 00 p. M. And midnight eastern on sunday on cspan 2. What about if the soviet Union Announced tomorrow that if we attack cuba, it will be a nuclear war . This thing is so serious. We are going to be an easy and we know what is happening now. Youve got to use something. Something may make these people shoot them off but i dont think as well. I will say this i must keep my own people very alert. Have to hang on tight. It is amazing that eisenhower tells him to have his people alerts. Everyone is completely on edge so course they are alert and kennedy lapse. He jocularly says hang on tightly to some nice moments on this terribly tense day. They are able to joke a little bit with each other and especially during this crisis, i think, they had a sense of how lonely it is to occupy that office and how youre getting all kinds of advice, good advice and faulty advice, which kennedy got from his joint chiefs. Eisenhower knew about faulty military advice and was able to speak with his Supreme Authority about the dangers as well as the advantages of military advice. He was a very useful ally to president kennedy. Listening in, the secret recorded conversations of president kennedy on q a. Washington journalcontinues. Host were going to talk about america by the numbers which is a weekly series we do. We want to focus on Consumer Sentiment and confidence going into this big shopping weekend. How is that even measured . We see reports that consumers are feeling good about shopping and spending money lately. Guest Consumer Confidence is measured by asking a ranting a random sampling of five questions. That also ask consumers about their own financial expectations and their financial conditions. Two of the most troubled rep little ones are university of michigan. Host it showed that Consumer Sentiment rose to about 82. 7 , the highest since july, 2007 and 60. 8 in october, 2011. What does it mean for our economy . Guest sometimes there is a direct correlation between what we see in terms of how consumers feel about the economy and what they are willing to spend in terms of the holidays and in general. What we are seeing now especially when you look at the university of michigan reported that the optimism about progress in the job market is offsetting a lot of concern about the fiscal cliff and the possibility of tax increases and cuts to government spending. Host when you look at Consumer Confidence and sentiment, what factors are in play . Guest a lot of times it has to do with how they feel about their own personal fan finances and how they feel about the job market and the prospects of finding employment or losing employment. There is a lot of concern still about the high unemployment levels but the idea that the Housing Market is improving and the idea that there are a lot more employers that are willing to slowly higher at this point seems to be reassuring consumers that there is some hope for the economy host does Consumer Confidence have an influence on Holiday Spending . Guest it does to some extent. When consumers feel most constrained by their own finances, they are not willing to spend as much. A number of reports coming out in the last couple of weeks showed that despite concerns about the fiscal cliff, people are willing to spend about the same amount of money they wanted to spend last year host this is from the Washington Post what are the expectations for this year . Guest black friday is traditionally one of the highestgrossing shopping days for the Holiday Season. It has been more so the last couple of years than Super Saturday which is the saturday before christmas. What might be a wild card is that last year when retailers decided to open early on thanksgiving day, we saw a fall off in sales. The first two weeks in deep in november. If we see that happen again, sales might not be as strong as people are projecting. National Retail Federation was projecting we would see about 147 million americans heading to the stores this weekend. That is a little bit down from last year but cyber monday which is another day for shopping, i think there is expectations that about 75 Million People will participate in that day as well a host i saw the figure earlier that they are thinking maybe 21 billion will be spent on black friday alone by consumers which would be up from 19 billion last year. Here is the front page of the Baltimore Sun what is the benefit to stores in the economy to open earlier . Guest Online Shopping is continually growing and represents about 4 of retail sales. Online retailers are very savvy how they are promoting themselves. Brick and Mortar Stores feel they have to get out there as quickly as possible if they want to compete with those kind of deals offered by amazon or other places. Some people are opening at 8 00 on thanksgiving day or 9 00 or 10 00. As much as they have been protested, consumers showed last night that theyre willing to come out hos. Host we saw this happening in 2010 that led away was making its way back. Di it help . Guest i think it did. We saw a 6. 3 increase over 2010 last year. That year we sell walmart and k mart and other big box retailers instituting layaway which went away when the economy was doing better. Host we are talking with Danielle Douglas of the Washington Post. Our lines are divided differently this morning if you plan to spend more, dial the first number spending alas, the second numbe