The United States Postal Service1775-2011(?)
The Post Office, we all know it, many of us hate it, and chances are if you're a denizen of the interwebs you barely use it. The Post Office is
$5.5 billion in the hole, and on the verge of defaulting.
Now to say nothing of how catastrophic piling a few hundred thousand more job losses onto the pyre of quazi-depression would be, what would this mean for America?
Should we have a Post Office at all?
Is the Republican Party right that it should be done away with because it proves the government can't run anything?
Do we not have a duty to the citizens that rely on it?
After all, the Constitution seems to think so
Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads".
These days we're so quick to argue about what powers Congress does or does not have, shouldn't we stick up for the ones it explicitly has? Can we not afford this?
Personally, I think the Postal Service does and will for the foreseeable future have a vital role in America. Keeping track of people's addresses and providing an easy way to change your contact information so that important business can find you seems like an essential service. Every first world nation has a post office, is America really so poor we can't have one? It seems laughable to me to expect the post office to be self sufficient while providing the service they provide (John Stewart likened it to a defunct business in New York where men on bicycles would go retrieve any item you could think of at any time and spirit it to your house unbelievably fast).
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Furthermore. This is one of the main ways most older people keep in contact with the rest of the world. The internet is not so pervasive that we can magically have packages or letters mailed to our doorstep through cyber-pixels or something.
Hell, what do people think the alternative is? A million tiny privately run post systems? A bunch of big ones (An inevitably if it becomes commercialized.) that may not want to do business with certain companies, limiting where/when/how you can get the post?
Edit: I don't know why the forums are somehow merging my replies and edits, but it's the second time this has happened today, and it's starting to tick me off.
I use the post office to mail things all the time, for vital records and whathaveyou the internet just doesn't cut it for a lot of jobs. I work for a college and every semester I have to mail the central office a pile of documents to keep working.
Now this isn't true for the bulk of America, but certainly for a lot of it I would imagine?
However, I do use the mail frequently for mailing packages and receiving netflix and magazines.
I want the USPS to stick around, absolutely, but that mail volume I cited above is going to keep dropping until it reaches items that still, and for the foreseeable future, will continue to travel through the mail, and this doesn't even take into account the almost 6 billion per year that the USPS is required, by law, to deposit into its employee's retirement accounts.
Yes a sharp decline, I want you to sit and think how much 167 billion pieces of mail is. Ten also think of where it is sent, not just in urban districts. Rural counties and such. The post office is an important part of the infrastructure and even I use it all the time. And I live most of my life on the internet.
Till the internet is as secure and dependable in all ways as paper mail, especially with records then the post office will be required. And that isn't even including its other jobs such as address registration and such.
Edit:If no one pointed out, I was going to point out that only the Postal Service has to put 6 billion into a retirement fund by law. No other part of the government has to do this. And it was designed in a way to help speed up the post office in going under.
Yes, but what you are missing is that the majority of that drop is almost certainly the more frivolous stuff.
As email and the like replaces regular mail for casual communication, the stuff delivered by the post office, by percentage, actually becomes more vital. Because that's all that's left.
Bills, notices, checks, etc.
1. The monopoly. Many other countries have opened their postal service to competition and it has not spelled doom.
2. The number of offices. Why are there so many post offices in my town when FedEx and UPS have only one each. Consolidate.
3. The USPS should be able to set its own prices instead of having to go to Congress.
4. I've been to countries where you can put a 'No Spam' sticker on your mailbox and then the postal services won't deliver junk mail to you. I want that here. Junk mail is such a waste of resources.
I don't know about elsewhere, but around here they are consolidating. My town has three post offices, but only one actually operates as such now....the other two are strictly retail counters and po box drops.
And they can't peel back to ups/federal size because they deal with more volume. I receive packages from the other carriers maybe eight times a month. I receive mail every single day they deliver, 26 days or so a month. Even discounting junk, i get 'real' mail at least 15 days a month or more.
Not other carrier is, to my knowledge, allowed to place letters on a mailbox. Letters are not easily left on doorsteps like boxes.
In our current economy even if all the post office did was write letters and then bury them it would be a mistake to do this right now if you ask me
I say, drop the 75 year requirement, and then re-absorb them into the federal government, instead of making them be a private entity.
(I wrote a petition about it here: http://forcechange.com/4262/save-the-u-s-postal-service/
And just drop weekend delivery. Lord.
I am not advocating layoffs, though, just maybe tone it down a bit temporarily? Oh and ask Congress to revise the funding requirements for the retirees
edit: oh, they did
And, like I said before, they're not even losing money right now. This is entirely a healthcare/accounting issue.
http://www.prc.gov/Docs/75/75095/USPS Preliminary Financial Information. (Unaudited) .pdf
Look at the "year to date" column. It's positive.
admittedly, not by much, but they're not supposed to earn a profit.
The number that people are worried about is the $4.5 billion that they're socking away each year for the "postal service retirement health benefit fund".
oh my god can we pleeeeeaaaaase have socialized medicine already?
Which, apparently, looks like that their most pessimistic projections of revenues wasn't pessimistic enough.
Still, according to this: http://www.huliq.com/10061/post-office-wants-pension-reform-cut-85-billion-deficit So even if they're showing a small loss this year in operating income, the real problem is still the health benefits.
here's an interesting report from the GAO
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11926t.pdf Actions Needed to Stave off Financial Insolvency
The end user mailbox. UPS and Fedex are not allowed to touch it. That's why, even if a parcel could fit inside the mailbox (such as with larger rural mailboxes), they cannot leave it there...they must leave it at your door, or elsewhere. Mailboxes are reserved for the USPS alone.
Also, I didn't know this, but there is also an explicit law forbidding any other company from carrying letter mail as well. So yes, the USPS does have an official, government-enforced monopoly on carrying mail (with narrow exceptions).
Basically, the extra money they get from having a monopoly makes up for the money they lose by being a public service. Also, they don't get any tax money.
It happened in 2007 right?
Wild guess here: Republicans
And again, if the USPS (a) wasn't forced into an absolutely ludicrous pension prefunding system and (b) was allowed to raise their rates (you know, just like those other shipping companies do when their costs rise), there wouldn't be a problem.
This is yet another GOP manufactured "crisis".
Edit: And remember that both FedEx and UPS use the USPS for last mile service when it's cheaper to outsource it to them.
This is entirely congress' fault and the GOP has been hooting that they own Congress for a year now, this is entirely their mess and the people most affected by closures will be Republican voters
They may own Congress, but they've spent the last 3 years talking about how everything is Obama's fault. So they let anything and everything that is bad happen, because they won't get blamed. Obama will.
~ Buckaroo Banzai