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Rain? Snow? Try $5.5b in debt [US POSTAL SERVICE]
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For me? The universality of man. This line of argument always reminds me of an interesting short story by Mark Twain: Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that the next Isaac Newton won't be born in the middle of Montana (Or Zimbabwe for that matter, which is why I'm a bit of a world federalist/liberal internationalist but that's neither here nor there.) and would bring about stunning advancements in human thought &c. but for the simple accident of birth forcing him to go without rather basic standards of living under your supposed suggestions. There is certainly a limit to which subsidies and such break the economic logic and so should not be supported. The rural aircraft subsidy that was the middle of the FAA furor, for instance, is something that could actually be better served through inter-city bus networks for slightly less money and much better ecological impact with very little trade-off. I'm not advocating blindness to economics, but for such basic things as universal postal service or utilities or even internet access with a cost of such trifling amounts I cannot take the societal waste argument seriously.
I'd like you to think about that last phrase for a moment or two. The fix to this problem is as simple as saying that Congress needs to stop telling the Post Office how to run their business. Meanwhile, you're advocating the government forced failure of an otherwise successful business. How does that fit into a free market again?
You make it sound like I am proposing forced relocation of all North Dakota or something. Farmers still farm and national parks still function, they just have to pay what it actually cost to mail letters. If it cost too much to live there people will move into more urban areas where it is easier to get services to them. I would rather see this done thru the present system but with the way the senate is set up it not possible.
I doubt that rising postal prices would actually cause rural residents to move to urban areas. I think it's more likely to detach them further from the mainstream.
Because someone has to grow the frigging food, man.
Right, but they can grow the frigging food while living in a mud hut with no electricity, power, internet, mail, or schools.
Or....something. Because heaven forbid our society have the audacity to create any sort of minimum standard of living and economic opportunity for people that choose not to live in Brooklyn. Or for children, whose parents make that choice for them. But fuck those kids.
Exactly. These are people that already pay more for a lot of shit (like groceries) or straight-up go without some things (like decent internet). Yet they still live there. But taking away their post office will certainly be the catalyst for their relocation to Berkeley. Sure.
Also, this. If I wanted to live in South Korea, I'd move to South Korea. And hell, they still have rural areas there, too.
Also: The fix to this problem is as simple as saying that Congress needs to stop telling the Post Office how to run their business. Meanwhile, you're advocating the government forced failure of an otherwise successful business. How does that fit into a free market again?
What's the free market have to do with it?
Listen, I don't hate rural people, I don't care where they live and I wish the post office could stay government run. All I am saying is that it takes alot of resources to run mail to people who live in places with low population densities and those people should be be the ones who pay for their services.
On the government side we are on triage and should be looking at doing the most good for the money.
On a society wide level we shouldn't be encouraging people to live in places that are unsustainable. If people want to live there, more power to them.
You certainly come off as you do hate them.
Do you feel like the postal service is prohibitively expensive to you, as is? Because, uh, they'd be self-sustaining right now at the current rates absent silly policies constraining their financial practices.
Is forty-two cents breaking your bank?
I'd be really curious as to how far you take this philosophy. I'm willing to guarantee that there exists some government expenditure that does not achieve the "most good for the money," but which you support. But hey, it probably doesn't benefit yokels.
When you declare their way of life "unsustainable," it implies that you probably do care just a teensy bit where they live.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Delivery of the "tags" wouldn't be all that much cheaper, really. You'd still have to drive the entire route.
And it's my understanding that that junk mail subsidizes universal delivery much more so than those oh-so-expensive stamps us cityfolk are forced to buy at outlandish rates.
Also, like McDermott said.. It's the freaking post office. It's the delivery of mail to and from our citizens and around the world. It's like, fundamental.
Also also, it was created by a founding Father. Throw that in their face! (of course they'll probably say that ben Franklin was an intellectual elitist snob, but fuck them.)
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
I think right now they basically make all their money from junk mail and netflix.
Ugh what a stupid name.
The way I had in mind was that individual offices would be able to change the way that they work on a local level after getting a fixed budget from DC.
Example: town A has a vote where they decide to cut services down to 3 days a week while town B decides to pay extra property taxes to keep service as it is.
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You honestly think the administrative overhead and needless complexity implied by such a situation would actually save money? And even if that were the case, you honestly believe it would be better than, you know, paying an extra few cents on a stamp? Which is, again, the absolute worst possible scenario. The far easier route would just be to stop requiring insane levels of pension/health funding and overall Congress telling them how to run their business without paying them for the privilege.
Pardon? The Post Office DOES turn a profit, as the past 4 pages of this thread have said. The only reason why they are so much in debt is that the last Republican Congress forced the Post Office to pay its pension fund 75 years in advance. That's why they're in debt. Also boo sucks to you for trusting UPS or Fedex; the moment they get their filthy, disease-ridden hands on the mail then you're going to see $5 a letter prices, not to mention rural areas being completely ignored/blackmailed into paying premiums for their mail.
Where are you getting the increased Administration cost?
As far as money, I would be advicating for this if the post office was gushing cash.
How about just dropping the ridiculous pension requirement?
Couldn't we fix the USPS by having Congress limiting its oversight to laying out general guidelines? Congress should simply say that the USPS's job is to deliver mail to everyone in the country at a flat rate, and leave the financial aspects of that to the people running the USPS. If that means we all have to pay a few pennies more a letter, that's still an amazing bargain to get a piece of mail sent across a continent (or even just across town).
Rigorous Scholarship
Also, before anyone gives this a serious look, they're probably going to wait out the ruling on the current phone book opt-out in Seattle, see if the phone book companies have a constitutional right to leave garbage on your doorstep.
If they do, then junk mail companies probably have a constitutional right to send you garbage in the mail.
Tiering delivery rates based on demographics and closing offices doesn't really seem all that outlandish (80% of the post offices in the US are in the red). I mean, sure, fix the pension bugaboo and maybe revisit some of the archaic rules binding the post office. But underlying all that is the fact that the post office is providing a service where demand is dropping precipitously and its previous operating mode is no longer going to be viable in the future.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
The pension thing is great though, we should demand that all companies in the US pre-fund their health care costs and retirement costs for 75 years. I am sure that would not hurt anyone...
Make me dictator for 30 seconds and I can make the post office's current problems go away. They probably need to make some long term adjustments to deal with the slow switch to electronic for trivial stuff, but so long as legal correspondence is handled through mail they have plenty of business.
I mean, a lot of the initial stuff will still be via mail, but the bulk is going to be electronic.
Corporate lawyers are very paper heavy.
Also, with the robo signing fiasco, I think we can safely say that judges are less than impressed by a non-existent paper trail.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
The problem is that you can solve the current problems but there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of what they are selling (delivery of primarily letters and paper circulars) and what the population at large is moving towards (e-mail, web based services, and internet coupon sites like groupon et al). That is a fundamental problem and private business is traditionally not very adept at managing such a shift (look at video rental chains for an example), let alone an entity like the post office.
And I'm extremely skeptical that legal correspondance is enough to keep about 550,000 people employed. Even the slow to adapt legal field is moving towards more electronic transactions.
Ugh, legal email. Financial email is bad enough. I really hate getting emails from my loan providers that are just "You have an important message! Click here to create an account or sign in to our third party service to download your secure PDF!"