Say what you will about postal service privatization. This isn’t a post about that. I just want to point out that the postal default is an entirely manufactured and needless occurrence. The USPS is mandated by congress to fund it’s retirement accounts 75 years into the future. In other words, the USPS is currently paying retirement benefits to employees that haven’t been born yet. No other federal agency has to do that. No private business would even dream of that. This default is due to congress, not USPS.
(Image from classwarkitteh, your source for political cats, apparently)
520 Chestnut 
According to the Postal Services accounts, it has paid more than $21 billion into a special fund for those admittedly ridicolous requirements. Nevertheless, it’s losses for the same period were $25 billion and gaining momentum. Even if you take away all the the pension contributions (which is ridicolous to assume, because the Postal Service should be contributing *something* to retirement plans) they were still losing a bit less than billion dollars a year in operations (closer to 500 million in the first year, but increasing to about a billion dollars in this latest year). Sure, maybe the Postal Service could have gotten along losing about a billion dollars every year for a few more years, maybe even a decade, but with declining mail volumes the problem is only getting worse.
So is it ‘constructed?’ Perhaps. But at worst its merely hurrying along what’s already going to happen.