6 ms·

What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

62 points by htunnicliff 3mo ago

Avicebron 3mo ago
That the US has failed as a country?
Joker_vD 3mo ago
A Soviet joke goes like this: "Daddy, daddy, they've said on the radio that vodka price goes up next month! Does it mean that you won't drink as much anymore?" — "No, son, it means that you won't eat as much no more". So. The new private owner(s) will try to increase their profit. Increasing the efficiency of the processes already in place while providing the same services with the same coverage/quality/etc. at the same prices is indeed one way to increase the profit... but it's one of the hardest ways. Hiking up the prices and discontinuing services with smallest margins is a much simpler, easier, and even more effort-efficient way so this is what's going to happen first.
Grombobulous 3mo ago
I read the whole article, and it had a lot of informed discussion within it, but ultimately that discussion felt a little pointless. The crisis is manufactured, the debate of “what to do” or “what would happen if privatization happens?” does not need to be a discussion. The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress. If it’s unprofitable, it’s barely unprofitable, especially in the scope of government services. How many days of the Iran war would fully fund the USPS’ operating budget deficit for a year? I’m not even sure that corporate lobbyists will be happy with privatization. For example, both FedEx and UPS rely on USPS for last mile delivery of some types of packages. What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week? Are they going to be happy when one of their most effective forms of marketing doubles in price or shrinks down to 3 day a week service?
- eru 3mo ago
  > The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress. Huh? Even Germany managed to privatise their snail mail, and approximately no one would want to renationalise it. What makes USPS a 'no-brainer public service'? What's the big benefit of having government snail mail? Mail delivery service is not a public good. It's both excludable and rivalrous. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good > What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week? Effectively calling USPS the 'federal agency of paper spam delivery' doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement?
  - notnaut 3mo ago
    If the USPS were fully privatized without strict government subsidies or mandates, rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges or lose service entirely. Once again… the United States is very large.
    - eru 3mo ago
      > [...] rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges [...] Surfacing the cost of service provision to end users is generally a good tool to align incentives. (Use welfare systems to give money to poor people. But don't worry about giving rich people support just because they are old or live in the sticks.)
  - redsocksfan45 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - garbagewoman 3mo ago
    What were the benefits to germany?
    - eru 3mo ago
      Lower prices, bigger volume in the market. And the privatised Deutsche Post (/ DHL) is now a world beating logistics company that makes plenty of profit, instead of subsidies and bleeding red ink all over. However Germany still has plenty of government interference in snail mail, like a universal service mandate (or a sector specific minimum wage). Denmark dropped that requirement, and Danish society hasn't collapsed so far.
- limagnolia 3mo ago
  Is it? I don't think I would miss the junk mail delivery service if it went away entirely.
  - galleywest200 3mo ago
    USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Besides that junk mail might actually increase if a private company was paid to take it to your house since they would have a profit motive - more junk mail delivered means more profits.
    - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
      Charge junk mail the same rate as first class. More money for the post office? That's a win. Or less junk mail? Also a win.
    - delichon 3mo ago
      > USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.
      - eru 3mo ago
        How does that square with their universal service obligation? Which county is that?
        rented_mule 3mo ago
        I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.
        3mo ago
- wwweston 3mo ago
  > The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt electorate. Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there. Once there member choices are shaped by the people who contact and persuade them. If the USPS is poorly funded or managed, it’s because US electorate either wanted that, or was inattentive about the relevant funding and management and cares more about other things. And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want. Most Americans also prefer to blame political folk devils to for the failures instead, and seem to be more happy with that than personal and community discipline that would be necessary to engage responsibly, though, so the system is arguably working to reflect people’s revealed preferences already. EDIT: I should probably add that it’s not obvious to me that it’s poorly managed. I’ve enjoyed decades of adequate-to-impressive service via USPS over a variety of locations.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 3mo ago
    "And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want." I hate this. There is plenty of research showing that the opinion of the broader electorate has almost no influence on most policies. Only lobbyists and donors count.
    - wwweston 3mo ago
      Elections still have consequences, right? I’d think the fallout between fall of 2024 and now illustrates that. And that was the choice of the electorate (unless someone can demonstrate results were tampered with). So voter choices count. There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters. Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most officeholders try to keep their promises: https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promises-once-in-government-what-the-evidence-says-127761 https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promi... I agree lobbyists have influence. What is a lobbyist and why aren’t more people lobbying? Donors also have influence, and yet the electorate has every opportunity to determine who donors must influence every election. Why would they choose someone who is only beholden to donors?
- afpx 3mo ago
  I love the USPS. I love going to the post office and seeing real people, especially people in the town I live in. It's a social gathering place in smaller towns. This push toward optimization in the US, gradient descent to the LCD - seems harmful to average people.
Supermancho 3mo ago
It's a casualty of political corruption, both moral in terms of Party first politics and run-of-the-mill crony capitalism. That's what it means. The consequences are far reaching for many existing industries. It may never be unraveled once initiated. It will give rise to more concentrated wealth and power. This is by design.
- bulbar 3mo ago
  And the current situation, having a billionaire running the country, is fully intentional by a major part of the society. Want to get rid of corruption? - Vote a representative of the source of that corruption (aka billionaires) into power... sorry, WHAT? Billionaire is keen to make billionaire-friendly politics. A surprising headline? Apparently.
comrade1234 3mo ago
The postal service was in the constitution from the beginning - Washington signed it. But the wording is a bit weird - obviously there's supposed to be a postal service but now with how bad tings have become, who knows.
- eru 3mo ago
  Huh, where's the postal service in the constitution? As far as I can tell your constitution allows the federal level to regulate postal services, but it does not require the establishment of government snail mail.
  - comrade1234 3mo ago
    "The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" The wording "shall" is what I meant by weird wording. But no roads? No post offices? Whatever. The constitution is extremely flawed and should be abandoned.
    - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
      That's quite a non sequitur there. The wording is weird, so we should abandon the entire constitution? Not so fast, comrade. Not so fast. You've got a lot of work ahead of you to fill in the gaps in your logic here, before any of us are going to agree with your conclusion.
      - deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
    - eru 3mo ago
      > But no roads? What's so confusing about that? Presumably the constitution assumes that normal roads are for the more local layers of government to deal with. I interpret 'shall have power' to mean 'if they want to, they can do it'. Doesn't mean they have. Eg they have the power to levy tariffs on foreign trade, but the constitution is perfectly happy with free trade, too.
RonovoRonove 3mo ago
[dead]
hingler36 3mo ago
Pretty important asterisk concerning the privatization of the Japanese rail network: this privatization led to the closure of a lot of rural, unprofitable lines. IMO this would play out similarly for the USPS; it's not hard to remain profitable when you can just cleave off the parts of your public service that are in the red.
- queenkjuul 3mo ago
  JR also owns tons of valuable real estate that brings them recurring revenue
- brandensilva 3mo ago
  The irony here is the red Republican states are the ones voting for this who will be most impacted by it.
  - stackbutterflow 3mo ago
    There's no irony because they'll never put two and two together and republican politicians will use the frustration to get reelected.
    - thrance 3mo ago
      Indeed, that's been part of their strategy ever since Reagan's.
- rainsford 3mo ago
  This is almost always the right answer to people who claim the government should be run like a business in a tone that suggests they believe they're the first person to ever have thoughts. Businesses and governments operate under wildly different constraints, the most significant being the general need of government to provide a broad range of services even where it's inefficient. Now people could make a reasonable argument that they actually do want government to run like a business by getting rid of costly functions or services with low ROI. But at least in the US this almost never seems to be the case and proponents of the argument just think government has a ton of excess waste that can be cut with no impact on services.
cobertos 3mo ago
Doesn't USPS also play a key role in a lot of other services? * ID verification * Vacant home notifications * Registered mail I have a hard time seeing a private company scrupulously handling these operations when the incentives to manipulate them could be very large.
- Avicebron 3mo ago
  Yes, it also had a mandate to deliver mail. So people living in the middle of nowhere New Mexico can do something like run a small business through delivery (this was on the radio the last time this nonsense was floated). It's actually kind of beautiful, something that I can't imagine would work with a privately owned system.
  - callc 3mo ago
    The beautiful thing is a society deeming universal (gasp!) access to mail to be important. The ugly part is profit driven mindset, and a “you live in an unprofitable area to mail to, sorry” obvious outcome
  - shimman 3mo ago
    They'd end up charging you the amount of money you'd make sending the package, that's how all these forms of rentierism work: Uber, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, etc. Private taxes they want to force onto people. Must fight it at any opportunity. I can't imagine the economic value something like USPS brings to the country, likely trillions of trillions over it's lifespan. Something the corpos would never admit.
- AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
  Also voting. If you privatize the post office, then either mail-in voting stops completely, or else a private company can control which mail-in ballots get delivered, and which ones don't.
  - Leonard_of_Q 3mo ago
    That'd be mostly a net-positive since mail-in voting seems to be hard to get right in your country. Better to get rid of it in all but the most pressing cases - those who can not leave the house, overseas military and such - and have people go to the voting booth themselves, show their ID, get a ballot and fill it out using a writing implement. Do the count locally at the end of the day and send the ballots to a central location for another count. You'll have a "paper trail" in case the count is questioned, you get the results the same day, you call make sure only those eligible to vote do so and more. If it can be done in places ranging from rural Sweden (population density < 1/km2) to urban India it surely can be done in the USA.
chank 3mo ago
It means prices will go up and service/quality will go down. I already consider the service sort of at a base state. If it gets any worse, it will just go under. Which is what they want.
charcircuit 3mo ago
>much of what USPS does is unprofitable The same could be said about many organizations within companies if you don't give them a proper budget. Once you start actually caring about being profitable it turns out that you can find how to do things in a way that is less wasteful. Cost acts as an incentive to reduce waste and if you remove it then there is no force to combat waste or unsustainable practices. >It’s not that private entities won’t deliver postal service; it’s that they quite literally can’t. If you paid someone $10,000 to deliver a letter to somewhere in the country I'm sure they could find a way to bring it there. It is not impossible.
- bulbar 3mo ago
  Yeah, of course they can/could, it's just that it does not make sense from an economic point of view. Which directly circles back to the beginning "USPS is not profitable".
JustinGoldberg9 3mo ago
It's already a (public) corporation. You can send mail through the non-profit, old postal service. You have to measure the postage yourself and put it in the slot called non-domestic mail.
- postalunsure 3mo ago
  Do you mean mail things as a non-profit organization? I see that on the USPS website, but it is only for non-profits. Are you referring to a different method?
bulbar 3mo ago
German railroad system worked pretty well, then it got partially privatized around 20 years ago. Supposingly cheaper that way. Turned out, cost were cut regarding infrastructure to make it cheaper. Today, the railroad system is terrible and the administration just agreed to spend 100 billion dollars on it. Do you want quality sustained over decades? Then prioritize quality over cost and keep it public. Do you want inevitable enshitififaction and something that barely works good enough? Privatize it.
- burnt-resistor 3mo ago
  Neoliberalism and libertarianism utopian bullshit ruin everything.
deepfriedchokes 3mo ago
Privatizing the USPS would disproportionately harm those who vote for the politicians who are advocating for privatization, which would track.
valeg 3mo ago
The end of mail-in voting? It seems this is the whole reason of this renewed push. Also, pillage the real estate.

62 points by htunnicliff 3mo ago

That the US has failed as a country?

A Soviet joke goes like this: "Daddy, daddy, they've said on the radio that vodka price goes up next month! Does it mean that you won't drink as much anymore?" — "No, son, it means that you won't eat as much no more". So. The new private owner(s) will try to increase their profit. Increasing the efficiency of the processes already in place while providing the same services with the same coverage/quality/etc. at the same prices is indeed one way to increase the profit... but it's one of the hardest ways. Hiking up the prices and discontinuing services with smallest margins is a much simpler, easier, and even more effort-efficient way so this is what's going to happen first.

Grombobulous 3mo ago

I read the whole article, and it had a lot of informed discussion within it, but ultimately that discussion felt a little pointless. The crisis is manufactured, the debate of “what to do” or “what would happen if privatization happens?” does not need to be a discussion. The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress. If it’s unprofitable, it’s barely unprofitable, especially in the scope of government services. How many days of the Iran war would fully fund the USPS’ operating budget deficit for a year? I’m not even sure that corporate lobbyists will be happy with privatization. For example, both FedEx and UPS rely on USPS for last mile delivery of some types of packages. What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week? Are they going to be happy when one of their most effective forms of marketing doubles in price or shrinks down to 3 day a week service?

eru 3mo ago
> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress. Huh? Even Germany managed to privatise their snail mail, and approximately no one would want to renationalise it. What makes USPS a 'no-brainer public service'? What's the big benefit of having government snail mail? Mail delivery service is not a public good. It's both excludable and rivalrous. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good > What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week? Effectively calling USPS the 'federal agency of paper spam delivery' doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement?
- notnaut 3mo ago
  If the USPS were fully privatized without strict government subsidies or mandates, rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges or lose service entirely. Once again… the United States is very large.
  - eru 3mo ago
    > [...] rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges [...] Surfacing the cost of service provision to end users is generally a good tool to align incentives. (Use welfare systems to give money to poor people. But don't worry about giving rich people support just because they are old or live in the sticks.)
- redsocksfan45 3mo ago
  [dead]
- garbagewoman 3mo ago
  What were the benefits to germany?
  - eru 3mo ago
    Lower prices, bigger volume in the market. And the privatised Deutsche Post (/ DHL) is now a world beating logistics company that makes plenty of profit, instead of subsidies and bleeding red ink all over. However Germany still has plenty of government interference in snail mail, like a universal service mandate (or a sector specific minimum wage). Denmark dropped that requirement, and Danish society hasn't collapsed so far.
limagnolia 3mo ago
Is it? I don't think I would miss the junk mail delivery service if it went away entirely.
- galleywest200 3mo ago
  USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Besides that junk mail might actually increase if a private company was paid to take it to your house since they would have a profit motive - more junk mail delivered means more profits.
  - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
    Charge junk mail the same rate as first class. More money for the post office? That's a win. Or less junk mail? Also a win.
  - delichon 3mo ago
    > USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.
    - eru 3mo ago
      How does that square with their universal service obligation? Which county is that?
      - rented_mule 3mo ago
        I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.
        3mo ago
wwweston 3mo ago
> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt electorate. Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there. Once there member choices are shaped by the people who contact and persuade them. If the USPS is poorly funded or managed, it’s because US electorate either wanted that, or was inattentive about the relevant funding and management and cares more about other things. And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want. Most Americans also prefer to blame political folk devils to for the failures instead, and seem to be more happy with that than personal and community discipline that would be necessary to engage responsibly, though, so the system is arguably working to reflect people’s revealed preferences already. EDIT: I should probably add that it’s not obvious to me that it’s poorly managed. I’ve enjoyed decades of adequate-to-impressive service via USPS over a variety of locations.
- vjvjvjvjghv 3mo ago
  "And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want." I hate this. There is plenty of research showing that the opinion of the broader electorate has almost no influence on most policies. Only lobbyists and donors count.
  - wwweston 3mo ago
    Elections still have consequences, right? I’d think the fallout between fall of 2024 and now illustrates that. And that was the choice of the electorate (unless someone can demonstrate results were tampered with). So voter choices count. There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters. Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most officeholders try to keep their promises: https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promises-once-in-government-what-the-evidence-says-127761 https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promi... I agree lobbyists have influence. What is a lobbyist and why aren’t more people lobbying? Donors also have influence, and yet the electorate has every opportunity to determine who donors must influence every election. Why would they choose someone who is only beholden to donors?
afpx 3mo ago
I love the USPS. I love going to the post office and seeing real people, especially people in the town I live in. It's a social gathering place in smaller towns. This push toward optimization in the US, gradient descent to the LCD - seems harmful to average people.

Supermancho 3mo ago

It's a casualty of political corruption, both moral in terms of Party first politics and run-of-the-mill crony capitalism. That's what it means. The consequences are far reaching for many existing industries. It may never be unraveled once initiated. It will give rise to more concentrated wealth and power. This is by design.

bulbar 3mo ago
And the current situation, having a billionaire running the country, is fully intentional by a major part of the society. Want to get rid of corruption? - Vote a representative of the source of that corruption (aka billionaires) into power... sorry, WHAT? Billionaire is keen to make billionaire-friendly politics. A surprising headline? Apparently.

comrade1234 3mo ago

The postal service was in the constitution from the beginning - Washington signed it. But the wording is a bit weird - obviously there's supposed to be a postal service but now with how bad tings have become, who knows.

eru 3mo ago
Huh, where's the postal service in the constitution? As far as I can tell your constitution allows the federal level to regulate postal services, but it does not require the establishment of government snail mail.
- comrade1234 3mo ago
  "The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" The wording "shall" is what I meant by weird wording. But no roads? No post offices? Whatever. The constitution is extremely flawed and should be abandoned.
  - AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
    That's quite a non sequitur there. The wording is weird, so we should abandon the entire constitution? Not so fast, comrade. Not so fast. You've got a lot of work ahead of you to fill in the gaps in your logic here, before any of us are going to agree with your conclusion.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - eru 3mo ago
    > But no roads? What's so confusing about that? Presumably the constitution assumes that normal roads are for the more local layers of government to deal with. I interpret 'shall have power' to mean 'if they want to, they can do it'. Doesn't mean they have. Eg they have the power to levy tariffs on foreign trade, but the constitution is perfectly happy with free trade, too.

RonovoRonove 3mo ago

[dead]

hingler36 3mo ago

Pretty important asterisk concerning the privatization of the Japanese rail network: this privatization led to the closure of a lot of rural, unprofitable lines. IMO this would play out similarly for the USPS; it's not hard to remain profitable when you can just cleave off the parts of your public service that are in the red.

queenkjuul 3mo ago
JR also owns tons of valuable real estate that brings them recurring revenue
brandensilva 3mo ago
The irony here is the red Republican states are the ones voting for this who will be most impacted by it.
- stackbutterflow 3mo ago
  There's no irony because they'll never put two and two together and republican politicians will use the frustration to get reelected.
  - thrance 3mo ago
    Indeed, that's been part of their strategy ever since Reagan's.
rainsford 3mo ago
This is almost always the right answer to people who claim the government should be run like a business in a tone that suggests they believe they're the first person to ever have thoughts. Businesses and governments operate under wildly different constraints, the most significant being the general need of government to provide a broad range of services even where it's inefficient. Now people could make a reasonable argument that they actually do want government to run like a business by getting rid of costly functions or services with low ROI. But at least in the US this almost never seems to be the case and proponents of the argument just think government has a ton of excess waste that can be cut with no impact on services.

cobertos 3mo ago

Doesn't USPS also play a key role in a lot of other services? * ID verification * Vacant home notifications * Registered mail I have a hard time seeing a private company scrupulously handling these operations when the incentives to manipulate them could be very large.

Avicebron 3mo ago
Yes, it also had a mandate to deliver mail. So people living in the middle of nowhere New Mexico can do something like run a small business through delivery (this was on the radio the last time this nonsense was floated). It's actually kind of beautiful, something that I can't imagine would work with a privately owned system.
- callc 3mo ago
  The beautiful thing is a society deeming universal (gasp!) access to mail to be important. The ugly part is profit driven mindset, and a “you live in an unprofitable area to mail to, sorry” obvious outcome
- shimman 3mo ago
  They'd end up charging you the amount of money you'd make sending the package, that's how all these forms of rentierism work: Uber, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, etc. Private taxes they want to force onto people. Must fight it at any opportunity. I can't imagine the economic value something like USPS brings to the country, likely trillions of trillions over it's lifespan. Something the corpos would never admit.
AnimalMuppet 3mo ago
Also voting. If you privatize the post office, then either mail-in voting stops completely, or else a private company can control which mail-in ballots get delivered, and which ones don't.
- Leonard_of_Q 3mo ago
  That'd be mostly a net-positive since mail-in voting seems to be hard to get right in your country. Better to get rid of it in all but the most pressing cases - those who can not leave the house, overseas military and such - and have people go to the voting booth themselves, show their ID, get a ballot and fill it out using a writing implement. Do the count locally at the end of the day and send the ballots to a central location for another count. You'll have a "paper trail" in case the count is questioned, you get the results the same day, you call make sure only those eligible to vote do so and more. If it can be done in places ranging from rural Sweden (population density < 1/km2) to urban India it surely can be done in the USA.

chank 3mo ago

It means prices will go up and service/quality will go down. I already consider the service sort of at a base state. If it gets any worse, it will just go under. Which is what they want.

charcircuit 3mo ago

>much of what USPS does is unprofitable The same could be said about many organizations within companies if you don't give them a proper budget. Once you start actually caring about being profitable it turns out that you can find how to do things in a way that is less wasteful. Cost acts as an incentive to reduce waste and if you remove it then there is no force to combat waste or unsustainable practices. >It’s not that private entities won’t deliver postal service; it’s that they quite literally can’t. If you paid someone $10,000 to deliver a letter to somewhere in the country I'm sure they could find a way to bring it there. It is not impossible.

bulbar 3mo ago
Yeah, of course they can/could, it's just that it does not make sense from an economic point of view. Which directly circles back to the beginning "USPS is not profitable".

JustinGoldberg9 3mo ago

It's already a (public) corporation. You can send mail through the non-profit, old postal service. You have to measure the postage yourself and put it in the slot called non-domestic mail.

postalunsure 3mo ago
Do you mean mail things as a non-profit organization? I see that on the USPS website, but it is only for non-profits. Are you referring to a different method?

bulbar 3mo ago

German railroad system worked pretty well, then it got partially privatized around 20 years ago. Supposingly cheaper that way. Turned out, cost were cut regarding infrastructure to make it cheaper. Today, the railroad system is terrible and the administration just agreed to spend 100 billion dollars on it. Do you want quality sustained over decades? Then prioritize quality over cost and keep it public. Do you want inevitable enshitififaction and something that barely works good enough? Privatize it.

burnt-resistor 3mo ago
Neoliberalism and libertarianism utopian bullshit ruin everything.

deepfriedchokes 3mo ago

Privatizing the USPS would disproportionately harm those who vote for the politicians who are advocating for privatization, which would track.

valeg 3mo ago

The end of mail-in voting? It seems this is the whole reason of this renewed push. Also, pillage the real estate.