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Rain? Snow? Try $5.5b in debt [US POSTAL SERVICE]
Posts
I think the problem here is that the GOP doesn't want to make it work because that would be like admitting that there are some things government institutions actually can do better than corporations.
Why did you say that, now we'll never fix it.
Eh. Right now the Post Office's problems are chiefly of it being run in some ways like a government office (mandated routes, restrictions on pricing) while it is supposedly a private enterprise. If it were either one or the other it would be much better off.
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Everything would be apples if we had commie health care like you, comrade. The Post Office has to set aside enough money to cover their employees grandchildren's healthcare needs in what appears to be an attempt to destroy them by George W Bush
It certainly would be hard for the Republicans to spin the shit storm in their favor, but being with the good guys means that only the lesser part of us actually wants to see it happen.
For free right? Out of the kindness of their heart? Why should farmers get more than anyone else who does a job.
But I was more talking about Alaska where I don't think farmers are very thick on the ground.
Mining, fishing, oil, tourism. Not just farming, broski.
Well, FedEx handles all their air freight, so I'll call that a net wash, which is probably being generous.
"When did America become the guy who runs out on his tab?"
It's just ridiculous and it is going to so get worse when all the Boomers are retired.
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That little shack in the middle of nowhere keeping an eye on the pipeline so you can heat your home in winter.
But fuck Yellowstone Park, m i rite?
Everybody should just live in an apartment in the Bronx.
EDIT: And this still doesn't answer the question of when we became such a sad, pathetic little nation that we decided that universal postal service was a luxury we could no longer afford.
Worked for the UN.
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1982
It's not about what they are doing out there. If it's worth it someone is just going to have to pick up the extra cost.
What gets me, and I am not just talking mail here, is that the government is is spending resources to make it cheaper to live in places where people don't need to live.
Yes, because the reason people move out into the boonies is because they can get mail. Sure. That's a deciding factor.
This isn't about them. Those idiotic yokels who refuse to live in SoDo. It's about us. Do we, as a nation, have the resources to provide universal mail service? Yes, yes we do. It's not even a significant expenditure. As we've shown, it would largely be an issue of not forcing them to overfund pension savings. But even aside from that, the total required to make their ends meet isn't even a rounding error in our federal budget.
The postal service should not be used to encourage people to move into cities. That's retarded.
This is true and a form of needless government waste when it comes to things like, say, agricultural subsidies. It is not true when it comes to things like ensuring a minimum standard of living and access to economic opportunities for citizens. Universal postal service (as well as stuff like RUS) fall into the latter category.
EDIT: Yeah, moniker puts it better than I do. Argue with him instead.
The USPS is being sabotaged by lawmakers so that they can get rid of it and watch UPS and Fedex stock rise. It really is like there's an illuminati conspiracy trying to turn the United States into a kleptocratic neofeudalist dystopia.
I think you're giving the current batch of lawmakers too much credit.
There's an election next year and people blame the president for things going pear shaped. That's the only reason.
You sure have the worst ideas. People live where they want to live and they deserve all government insititutions that are avaliable to them.
Do vote-by-mail ballots tend to skew Democrat, by any chance?
If you want to stop the government from spending resources to make it possible to do things that otherwise would be silly, the USPS is the wrong place to start. You get minimal return for a lot of work. Start with the agricultural subsidies. Or with projects for various vehicles being spread across a huge number of congressional districts even though it massively increases the cost of the project. Or with switching to single payer health care. Or any number of other things that have returns several orders of magnitude higher for reducing silly government spending than this will.
edit: I'd expect vote by mail tends to be predominantly military and rural, which I don't think are typically democratic territory (although, if you wanted to argue that military members will tend to be younger and lower class and therefore democratic I could be convinced).
USPS folding would probably make that difficult
This is such the tip of the iceberg about what would happen if the US post went down. There are so so so so so so so so many things that are contractually or legally bound to be done by USPS......
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The military, and most military towns, are pretty red. The myth that the republicans are good for defense is strong.
My problem is less government waste and more waste for society. When the government steps in and makes it cheaper and easier to live in rural places it screws with the market for living and working in those places.
And when the government steps in and makes it cheaper and easier to live in urban areas, it screws with the market for living and working in those places? The cities wouldn't be so successful with out our sweet interstate highway system, our subsidized big water projects, our harbors and ports maintained and dredged by (whoever does that, the army corps of engineers, maybe? I don't really know).
Making it cheaper and easier to live places is kind of the reason d' etra of government in the first place.
The government doesn't step in there though. The people in those cities pay for the infrastructure.
Rural living is subsidized in many ways because the taxes those people pay doesn't cover the expense of delivering them the services and such they need to live.
Which isn't itself a problem. After all, as pointed out above, there's many good reasons to have people living out in many of these areas.
Fair enough point. I would say the economic forces are enough but one could make an argument otherwise.
What makes you think rural population are worth their resource cost?
Because having the ability to exist outside of a city provides tremendous mental and physical health benefits for millions of people and broadens our culture's diversity.
Ah well, they ran an unsustainable program.
If that's their only voting method, then it looks like they'll have to either change, or develop something like USPS themselves, which I doubt will happen.
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Yeah, but the reading/writing rates are much lower, so less mail.
The pension/healthcare thing seems pretty ridiculous. I'd like them to go private, but as others said, that'd probably mean they'd drop all the non-profitable routes. We could try a model like we do with utils, but we all know how well that's worked out.