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The postal service predates the US government and has been running since 1775 (Benjamin Franklin first postmaster general). It was cash-flow positive until it

The postal service predates the US government and has been running since 1775 (Benjamin Franklin first postmaster general). It was cash-flow positive until it was sabotaged by Republicans, who banned it from raising prices above inflation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enhancement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...) while simultaneously requiring it to spend $54 billion to prefund pension benefits for the next 50 years. So if you want to know why they're having monetary problems, look no further. >"an extremely politicized government can't run services well" The Republicans normally make this a truism by sabotaging government programs. With the exception of the military, everything else gets squeezed and forced to justify their budget requests, but hardly anyone ever says "you want to raise the DoD budget by $100 billion? HOW ARE WE GONNA PAY FOR THAT?" Notice how if you propose $75 billion for tuition free college, GOP spokespeople are all over the media raising questions about funding mechanisms. The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like a for profit business" concerns.

bhupy 6y ago
> The Republicans normally make this a truism by sabotaging government programs Yes, but you have to contend with the reality that you are participating in the same government as they are. It's like constantly insisting on sharing a pool with a kid that constantly insists on peeing in it, with no real way to kick that kid out. It's a byproduct of the polity in which we are participating, and as long as a democratically elected government consists of people who don't agree with you (read: polarized / corrupt), the services they run will have problems, as we are seeing. > The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like a for profit business" concerns. Just because the USPS has been reliable in the past, doesn't mean that it's structurally set up to be reliable forever. It could also just mean that we weren't as polarized about how the USPS should function in the past, and we are now. As long as that continues to be the case, the USPS will be a sub-optimal agency. In contrast, how many goods & services provided by the private sector have this problem? If a corporation is self-sabotaging, it will die, and be replaced by another corporation. That doesn't appear to be the case with a polarized government. Also, the allergic reaction to privatization / profits strikes me as just as (if not more) reactionary than the right-wing allergic reaction to public services. The private sector is involved in reliably providing us with critical goods & services like food, clothing, furniture, housing (in markets without onerous zoning), transportation, information technology, e-mail, cloud computing, electronics, etc etc etc. All of those things gotten cheaper over time (even relative to inflation), have seen an increase in investment over time, and an increase in quality over time. The profit motive is just the incentive for people to provide goods & services for others, as efficiently as possible. It's not a silver bullet, as monopolies can lead to rent seeking, but to suggest that the private sector is always and unquestionably "bad" is not a serious opinion worth engaging with. Importantly, the public sector is also not a silver bullet, as we are seeing. Also, privatized postal services aren't novel either. Singapore's postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company. The UK's postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company. Germany's postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company. Japan's postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company. Your issue is that you participate in a government where your fellow citizens are voting to sabotage the public services. From where I sit, the private sector strikes me as strictly better than a self-sabotaging public sector that's governed by Republican politicians every 4-8 years. Either we continue to swim in a pee-filled pool, or we figure out another swimming arrangement.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  > with no real way to kick the kid out The US has "kicked out" two or three "kids" over its history. It'll be interesting to see where the Republican party's strategy goes in the near future.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    And those kids keep coming back, because the US is comprised of a large/heterogenous population that isn’t really going away. Power has reliably flip-flopped every 4-8 years, and “the bad guys” have nearly always come back into power. Tying our goods & services to that strikes me as an odd basis for a system of government, and altogether discounting privatization as a solution to this strikes me as equally dogmatic as those that say blindly regurgitate “government can’t run services”.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      But on the flip side, the same population that keeps voting for those "kids" runs some of the businesses, stores, etc. A good solution is probably a redundant solution, but pushing the solution too far towards only government versus privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect. Taking that generalization and concretizing it to the topic of a post office, there are several alternatives in the private sector already to USPS. but they don't serve the margins of the country like USPS does as per its constitutional mandate.
      - bhupy 6y ago
        > A good solution is probably a redundant solution, but pushing the solution too far towards only government versus privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect. You hit the nail on the head: you need both public and private. I will push back on the idea that “privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect”, because that’s just not true for the other goods and services that rural people require (food, clothing, etc). If there’s a market need for something, it will be met at the fair market value for that thing — provided there are no exogenic barriers like regulation or endogenic barriers like monopolies/cartels. At best, you can probably make the case that rural areas will no longer receive subsidized service, but it’s worth asking ourselves if that’s even a desirable goal. And even if it is, it’s worth considering if nationalization is the best way to achieve subsidized rural delivery, or if direct subsidy or a UBI is the better way to achieve that, or perhaps even regulating the private carriers just like for eg food quality is regulated by the FDA. I’ll also add that the rural population is overwhelmingly the set of people who are aggressively voting for the kids peeing in the pool. > Taking that generalization and concretizing it to the topic of a post office, there are several alternatives in the private sector already to USPS Unfortunately this is not true. The USPS has a legislated monopoly on first class paper mail. UPS/FedEx/DHL/Amazon couldn’t send mail to a mailbox if they wanted to. Crucially, this means that mail-in ballots cannot be delivered by anyone except for the agency that a certain political party is trying to kneecap to suppress those very ballots — even if there is a market need for reliable ballot delivery.

bhupy 6y ago

> The Republicans normally make this a truism by sabotaging government programs Yes, but you have to contend with the reality that you are participating in the same government as they are. It's like constantly insisting on sharing a pool with a kid that constantly insists on peeing in it, with no real way to kick that kid out. It's a byproduct of the polity in which we are participating, and as long as a democratically elected government consists of people who don't agree with you (read: polarized / corrupt), the services they run will have problems, as we are seeing. > The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like a for profit business" concerns. Just because the USPS has been reliable in the past, doesn't mean that it's structurally set up to be reliable forever. It could also just mean that we weren't as polarized about how the USPS should function in the past, and we are now. As long as that continues to be the case, the USPS will be a sub-optimal agency. In contrast, how many goods & services provided by the private sector have this problem? If a corporation is self-sabotaging, it will die, and be replaced by another corporation. That doesn't appear to be the case with a polarized government. Also, the allergic reaction to privatization / profits strikes me as just as (if not more) reactionary than the right-wing allergic reaction to public services. The private sector is involved in reliably providing us with critical goods & services like food, clothing, furniture, housing (in markets without onerous zoning), transportation, information technology, e-mail, cloud computing, electronics, etc etc etc. All of those things gotten cheaper over time (even relative to inflation), have seen an increase in investment over time, and an increase in quality over time. The profit motive is just the incentive for people to provide goods & services for others, as efficiently as possible. It's not a silver bullet, as monopolies can lead to rent seeking, but to suggest that the private sector is always and unquestionably "bad" is not a serious opinion worth engaging with. Importantly, the public sector is also not a silver bullet, as we are seeing. Also, privatized postal services aren't novel either. Singapore's postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company. The UK's postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company. Germany's postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company. Japan's postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company. Your issue is that you participate in a government where your fellow citizens are voting to sabotage the public services. From where I sit, the private sector strikes me as strictly better than a self-sabotaging public sector that's governed by Republican politicians every 4-8 years. Either we continue to swim in a pee-filled pool, or we figure out another swimming arrangement.

shadowgovt 6y ago
> with no real way to kick the kid out The US has "kicked out" two or three "kids" over its history. It'll be interesting to see where the Republican party's strategy goes in the near future.
- bhupy 6y ago
  And those kids keep coming back, because the US is comprised of a large/heterogenous population that isn’t really going away. Power has reliably flip-flopped every 4-8 years, and “the bad guys” have nearly always come back into power. Tying our goods & services to that strikes me as an odd basis for a system of government, and altogether discounting privatization as a solution to this strikes me as equally dogmatic as those that say blindly regurgitate “government can’t run services”.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    But on the flip side, the same population that keeps voting for those "kids" runs some of the businesses, stores, etc. A good solution is probably a redundant solution, but pushing the solution too far towards only government versus privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect. Taking that generalization and concretizing it to the topic of a post office, there are several alternatives in the private sector already to USPS. but they don't serve the margins of the country like USPS does as per its constitutional mandate.
    - bhupy 6y ago
      > A good solution is probably a redundant solution, but pushing the solution too far towards only government versus privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect. You hit the nail on the head: you need both public and private. I will push back on the idea that “privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect”, because that’s just not true for the other goods and services that rural people require (food, clothing, etc). If there’s a market need for something, it will be met at the fair market value for that thing — provided there are no exogenic barriers like regulation or endogenic barriers like monopolies/cartels. At best, you can probably make the case that rural areas will no longer receive subsidized service, but it’s worth asking ourselves if that’s even a desirable goal. And even if it is, it’s worth considering if nationalization is the best way to achieve subsidized rural delivery, or if direct subsidy or a UBI is the better way to achieve that, or perhaps even regulating the private carriers just like for eg food quality is regulated by the FDA. I’ll also add that the rural population is overwhelmingly the set of people who are aggressively voting for the kids peeing in the pool. > Taking that generalization and concretizing it to the topic of a post office, there are several alternatives in the private sector already to USPS Unfortunately this is not true. The USPS has a legislated monopoly on first class paper mail. UPS/FedEx/DHL/Amazon couldn’t send mail to a mailbox if they wanted to. Crucially, this means that mail-in ballots cannot be delivered by anyone except for the agency that a certain political party is trying to kneecap to suppress those very ballots — even if there is a market need for reliable ballot delivery.