6 ms·

The Postal Service Deserves a Permanent Bailout

62 points by erentz 7y ago

jedieaston 7y ago
I mean, it's not like the US would let the USPS fail, as that'd cause so many dependent businesses and services (if nothing else, the IRS and Census forms) to fail. Unless they plan on running a free internet line to everybody's house that can have messages jammed down it very cheaply, but that seems more expensive than keeping the USPS around.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  How do you vote by mail (the most secure way to vote when one cannot vote in person) without the USPS?
  - rhexs 7y ago
    UPS or Fedex, shockingly, can easily deliver envelopes!
    - scollet 7y ago
      What are you advocating? Or was this just a baseless attempt at snide humor?
    - mxuribe 7y ago
      But there are many places where Amazon, ups, and fedex, etc. depends on USPS for last mile delivery.
    - Craighead 7y ago
      Is tampering with their processes a felony?
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      Those don’t have a legal mandate to deliver to every address in the US.
      - msla 7y ago
        The USPS doesn't deliver to every address in the US. I lived in a place with an address but no USPS mail delivery. UPS and FedEx got there.
    - sergiomattei 7y ago
      Yes, because private companies with no legal requirement to deliver to every address should be handed power over our voting process on a silver platter.
    - bdavis__ 7y ago
      they can, but not with any kind of custody and integrity like the post office. postal employees are background checked and the process is monitored and audited to ensure the integrity of the mail system. voting by mail is one thing that is too important to trust to a private, for profit business. so is waging war, and maintaining the public health.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    Half of the people in power seems to think that (no votes by mail) is a bonus feature, not a bug...
- excalibur 7y ago
  Congress has been running the USPS into the ground for decades. Probably deliberately. Probably for purposes of privatization and profiteering.
- dTal 7y ago
  If there's one thing the past 4 years should have shown you, it's that "sensible heads will prevail" is no longer a safe assumption to make about the US government. I'm not being glib - we are now faced with a situation where the people in charge of the government are actively dismantling its own institutions with no regard for knock-on effects. Don't catch yourself thinking "Surely they wouldn't $foo". They absolutely would $foo, and $bar too if they could get away with it.
adelHBN 7y ago
I am all for bailing out USPS. But it won't be permanent. They'll have issues again, their very nature of being a government-operated institution guarantees that. This is not the first time the USPS is in trouble. After the financial Panic of 1837, the USPS almost collapsed. Congress had to step in to help it, and by 1845 they gave USPS complete monopoly, which killed the more efficient and cheaper private mail delivery enterprises. See "America's First Great Depression" by Alasdair Roberts.
- jumelles 7y ago
  It hasn't been government-operated since 1970.
  - didgeoridoo 7y ago
    It’s an independent governmental agency under the executive branch. If the USPS isn’t “government operated”, then neither is the CIA, FCC, or Social Security Administration.
    - adelHBN 7y ago
      Great reply. That's exactly what I said. Fannie Mae isn't technically government-operated - but it's a government-sponsored enterprise.
      - Craighead 7y ago
        Actually it's a low quality comment similar to yours.
  - adelHBN 7y ago
    That's just semantics. That's like saying Fannie Mae is not government operated. Yes, both are technically correct. Regardless, they are encumbered by government oversight. They are U.S. government-sponsored enterprises.
    - 7y ago
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
I'm in favor of a bailout, but only if mail is substantially reworked to prevent the unbelievable flood of tree-killing paper spam I get deluged with. It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings. We need some way of imposing additional costs on mail marketing, such as required payments to people if mail arrives at their mailbox. It is mentally taxing to sift through crap mail searching for relevance. The USPS also needs to establish some sort of official email for people with similar spam suppression requirements, so that legal or official government messaging has an appropriate destination besides "kill tree, send mail". In the 1990s I worked on a USPS project, and the sheer size of bulk mail processing (aka junk mail) in facilities was probably 100x what the mail processing for personal letters was.
- titzer 7y ago
  > It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings. This is a direct function of the completely misguided (IMHO) idea that government services need to be sustainable only on usage fees. That's a failure of understanding what government is for and effectively a regressive tax. We need another mechanism for keeping the system efficient. Making it market-based isn't the only one.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    That would be much less of a problem if bulk mailing rates were eliminated. As for the evils of government, I hesitate to even think about what the corporate solution to the coronavirus would look like.
rmrfrmrf 7y ago
Repeal the PAEA, pass a postal banking act, and fund the USPS with taxpayer dollars as is allowed by the Constitution. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
burmer 7y ago
Props for the photo caption too
acdha 7y ago
The story really should have lead with “repeal the 2006 PAEA” which imposed funding requirements given to no other business: https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis... The USPS would have been cash-flow positive for years had it not been deliberately sabotaged by Republicans seeking to privatize it.
foxyv 7y ago
We need to bail out the Postal Service so they can stop needing to make money on junk mail.
prirun 7y ago
In any business, when demand shrinks, the business has to also shrink. I don't understand the need to have 6 day/week delivery in modern times when there has been such a huge decline if mail volume. It seems to me they should have cut this down to 3 days a week, then 2, and I don't even think 1 day/week would be unreasonable for 1st class mail. But maybe that doesn't work logistically because they still have to store the mail they're not delivering (even though there isn't much of it). Doing the package deliveries - I dunno. It seems like if there was a demand for this service, more competition would have sprung up for FedEx and UPS without the USPS needing to get involved. Then again, maybe the USPS is helping to keep shipping rates down. Hard to say what prices would be if the USPS hadn't gotten involved in package shipping, overnight delivery, etc.
calmworm 7y ago
Can they simply offer a “no ads/no bulk mail” USPS+ option? $5/month? I’d be happy to pay it. It would save a lot of processing costs and trees too. I’m not sure what they are making more than that off my mailbox per month now though.

62 points by erentz 7y ago

I mean, it's not like the US would let the USPS fail, as that'd cause so many dependent businesses and services (if nothing else, the IRS and Census forms) to fail. Unless they plan on running a free internet line to everybody's house that can have messages jammed down it very cheaply, but that seems more expensive than keeping the USPS around.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
How do you vote by mail (the most secure way to vote when one cannot vote in person) without the USPS?
- rhexs 7y ago
  UPS or Fedex, shockingly, can easily deliver envelopes!
  - scollet 7y ago
    What are you advocating? Or was this just a baseless attempt at snide humor?
  - mxuribe 7y ago
    But there are many places where Amazon, ups, and fedex, etc. depends on USPS for last mile delivery.
  - Craighead 7y ago
    Is tampering with their processes a felony?
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    Those don’t have a legal mandate to deliver to every address in the US.
    - msla 7y ago
      The USPS doesn't deliver to every address in the US. I lived in a place with an address but no USPS mail delivery. UPS and FedEx got there.
  - sergiomattei 7y ago
    Yes, because private companies with no legal requirement to deliver to every address should be handed power over our voting process on a silver platter.
  - bdavis__ 7y ago
    they can, but not with any kind of custody and integrity like the post office. postal employees are background checked and the process is monitored and audited to ensure the integrity of the mail system. voting by mail is one thing that is too important to trust to a private, for profit business. so is waging war, and maintaining the public health.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Half of the people in power seems to think that (no votes by mail) is a bonus feature, not a bug...
excalibur 7y ago
Congress has been running the USPS into the ground for decades. Probably deliberately. Probably for purposes of privatization and profiteering.
dTal 7y ago
If there's one thing the past 4 years should have shown you, it's that "sensible heads will prevail" is no longer a safe assumption to make about the US government. I'm not being glib - we are now faced with a situation where the people in charge of the government are actively dismantling its own institutions with no regard for knock-on effects. Don't catch yourself thinking "Surely they wouldn't $foo". They absolutely would $foo, and $bar too if they could get away with it.

adelHBN 7y ago

I am all for bailing out USPS. But it won't be permanent. They'll have issues again, their very nature of being a government-operated institution guarantees that. This is not the first time the USPS is in trouble. After the financial Panic of 1837, the USPS almost collapsed. Congress had to step in to help it, and by 1845 they gave USPS complete monopoly, which killed the more efficient and cheaper private mail delivery enterprises. See "America's First Great Depression" by Alasdair Roberts.

jumelles 7y ago
It hasn't been government-operated since 1970.
- didgeoridoo 7y ago
  It’s an independent governmental agency under the executive branch. If the USPS isn’t “government operated”, then neither is the CIA, FCC, or Social Security Administration.
  - adelHBN 7y ago
    Great reply. That's exactly what I said. Fannie Mae isn't technically government-operated - but it's a government-sponsored enterprise.
    - Craighead 7y ago
      Actually it's a low quality comment similar to yours.
- adelHBN 7y ago
  That's just semantics. That's like saying Fannie Mae is not government operated. Yes, both are technically correct. Regardless, they are encumbered by government oversight. They are U.S. government-sponsored enterprises.
  - 7y ago

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

I'm in favor of a bailout, but only if mail is substantially reworked to prevent the unbelievable flood of tree-killing paper spam I get deluged with. It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings. We need some way of imposing additional costs on mail marketing, such as required payments to people if mail arrives at their mailbox. It is mentally taxing to sift through crap mail searching for relevance. The USPS also needs to establish some sort of official email for people with similar spam suppression requirements, so that legal or official government messaging has an appropriate destination besides "kill tree, send mail". In the 1990s I worked on a USPS project, and the sheer size of bulk mail processing (aka junk mail) in facilities was probably 100x what the mail processing for personal letters was.

titzer 7y ago
> It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings. This is a direct function of the completely misguided (IMHO) idea that government services need to be sustainable only on usage fees. That's a failure of understanding what government is for and effectively a regressive tax. We need another mechanism for keeping the system efficient. Making it market-based isn't the only one.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  That would be much less of a problem if bulk mailing rates were eliminated. As for the evils of government, I hesitate to even think about what the corporate solution to the coronavirus would look like.

rmrfrmrf 7y ago

Repeal the PAEA, pass a postal banking act, and fund the USPS with taxpayer dollars as is allowed by the Constitution. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

burmer 7y ago

Props for the photo caption too

acdha 7y ago

The story really should have lead with “repeal the 2006 PAEA” which imposed funding requirements given to no other business: https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis... The USPS would have been cash-flow positive for years had it not been deliberately sabotaged by Republicans seeking to privatize it.

foxyv 7y ago

We need to bail out the Postal Service so they can stop needing to make money on junk mail.

prirun 7y ago

In any business, when demand shrinks, the business has to also shrink. I don't understand the need to have 6 day/week delivery in modern times when there has been such a huge decline if mail volume. It seems to me they should have cut this down to 3 days a week, then 2, and I don't even think 1 day/week would be unreasonable for 1st class mail. But maybe that doesn't work logistically because they still have to store the mail they're not delivering (even though there isn't much of it). Doing the package deliveries - I dunno. It seems like if there was a demand for this service, more competition would have sprung up for FedEx and UPS without the USPS needing to get involved. Then again, maybe the USPS is helping to keep shipping rates down. Hard to say what prices would be if the USPS hadn't gotten involved in package shipping, overnight delivery, etc.

calmworm 7y ago

Can they simply offer a “no ads/no bulk mail” USPS+ option? $5/month? I’d be happy to pay it. It would save a lot of processing costs and trees too. I’m not sure what they are making more than that off my mailbox per month now though.