> Is that because there's cross-subsidy from non-rural folks
This is how a lot of subsidies work in the US. City-dwellers subsidize rural communities.
> you think USPS is more efficient than a private sector alternative would be?
Likely any cost savings non-rural people would see is at the cost of pensions, employee benefits, or other potential stones-to-be-bled. If USPS is privatized, these things will be strangled to death.
> Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
No, I don't think so. This is just a backdoor to make privatization easier: whenever some state either mismanages their postal service or simply can't keep it afloat, we'll be at the cutting block again. Furthermore, there's obvious potential efficiencies an interstate mail network has compared to a state-level mail network. The "decentralization" here just necessitates more communication overhead, potentially different laws requiring re-sorting, and a bunch of other potential headaches.
> If USPS did not have monopoly, they would be severely undercut in profitable areas
So in essence, residents of "profitable areas" are overpaying for mail to subsidize mail service to those in unprofitable rural areas.
But then the next question is: why go through this roundabout subsidization? Why not just subsidize rural first class mail delivery by the state directly?
This also ignores the fact that the USPS does not have a monopoly on sending packages, and is still able to serve package deliveries to rural areas, aren't they?
If mail was privatized, they would just stop delivering to rural addresses. Which I'm fine with. Rural communities are subsidized by the federal government far, far too much.
Is that because there's cross-subsidy from non-rural folks or because you think USPS is more efficient than a private sector alternative would be?
Also, even if we accept that the government doing mail delivery is good, why does it need to be a federal agency? Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
Right, and that exposes the reality that the USPS is at best, a state run subsidization scheme for rural mail delivery. But if that's the case, why subsidize it indirectly through selectively inflated prices, which regressively hurt poor people in urban markets)?
Sounds like if the problem is that rural mail is socially important, we ought to subsidize it directly.
>1) Except that NO OTHER COMPANY needs to prepay pensions for 70 years.
I wrote that the newspaper industry was the other that by 2006 was clearly in decline for the same reason as USPS letter delivery: The Internet. Most industries aren't like this.
>2) The USPS is supposed to be unprofitable--it's supposed to service everyone.
I said nothing about profitability. The Constitution also says nothing about profitability or anything else about USPS, other than that Congress has the authority to establish post offices. That's it.
That said, Congress has historically required USPS to self-fund as much of its operations as is practical. Were this not the case, postage rates would never have risen in history, before or after the 1971 reorganization of the cabinet-level agency to the quasi-independent entity that it is today. Nor would it have consistently issued new stamp editions to sell to the public.
More to the point, making sure future USPS pensions are funded has nothing to do with profitability, at least directly. It's simply good sense given the ongoing and, in all likelihood, irreversible decline toward zero non-parcel volume. Even if the USPS were mandated by law to always run at a slight loss to maximize customers' savings on postage, pension prefunding would still be prudent.
>The problem is that the arguments around the USPS aren't made in good faith. The goal is to bankrupt the USPS so that they have to sell off the extremely valuable real estate that many USPS facilities sit on.
First, there is no major political movement in the US to "bankrupt the USPS", presumably in advance of a sale. No political party has such in its platform. (If you reply that the very absence of such is proof that the plan exists, I'll just throw up my hands and give up now.)
Second, there's nothing in the Constitution that would prohibit USPS from being privatized, which has happened in most European countries, usually with little controversy.
> Privatization isn't looking too bad. I'm all for strong employee benefits and organized labor, but 75 years' pre-funded benefits for retired workers seems excessive.
The whole purpose of that unique mandate is to make privatization look better by making the state of the USPS look bad.
I don't even know why I'm replying to this, but this sort of reasoning makes my blood boil.
A lot of clueless people throw in the "p" word (privatization, or private competition) without really thinking things through.
The USPS is based on the idea of cross-subsidies. The fact that it's easy to deliver mail to, say, 100 addresses in San Francisco (a carrier can just walk a block and do it), subsidies the fact that in, say, Nebraska they would have to drive 100 miles to deliver to the same number of addresses. No private company would do this; they would just deliver in the cities, and tell the rural folks to fuck off. The private operators would just cherry-pick the profitable routers, and dump the rest. Is that what you want to see happen?
> USPS benefited from national mail logistics only being available to government level endeavors.
What Kool-Aid are you drinking? The Post Office didn't benefit from anything, it was mandated because no such service yet existed.
Prior to the Office of the Postmaster General being established, postal service was disjointed and limited at best in the colonies. In the 1600s you had 2 routes in the colonies, Boston to England and Boston to New York City. It was prohibitively expensive and limited largely to business and government communications. In the 1700s the Imperial Postal Service was extended to the colonies with fixed rates and taxes included, and it was incredibly unreliable.
The Post Office was born out of frustration, one of the founding fathers ran a news paper and the Imperial Post couldn't even deliver papers reliably. The Post Office was mandated by the founding fathers under the principle that everyone has the right to secure, efficient, reliable, and affordable mail service.
With the advent of the Interstate Highway System and many other technological advances over the prevailing 200 years, the Post Office was actually able to reduce costs and turn a profit.
During the civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s, the postal workers began protesting and striking because work conditions and compensation. They eventually won the right to unionized. In response to unionization the Postal Reorganization Act (PRA) of 1970 abolished the Post Office Department and turned the Post Office into an independent agency that was excluded from the US Budget.
One could argue that the PRA was the start of union busting tactics employed by the conservative government in power to bankrupt the post office. It doesn't help that every conservative government since then has enacted some sort of constraint upon the USPS that isn't mandated on private services. The most recent being the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 which required the USPS to switch from a Pay-As-You-Go to a Pre-Funded model for it's retirement plans. That's akin to your mortgage company calling you up and saying you'll need to pay off 100% of your principal next year.
> See USPS vs. FedEx/UPS - USPS treats its employees well, delivers to everyone, and controls prices to make basic services accessible to all citizens
UPS is unionized and notorious for paying very good wages. The difference is that UPS doesn't deliver to a lot of rural (unprofitable) areas. That _is_ something the government should be funding through USPS. On the other hand the travesty that is the USPS delivery vehicle procurement process shows maybe we shouldn't always rely on government for everything.
> I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory.
In this case industry also created a market where there previously wasn't one for your educational funds. Your local school district no longer has a monopoly on tax revenue for schools and is forced to improve to compete. I would argue we should be explicitly subsidizing those disabled students you're talking about rather than implicitly have everyone else pay for them. Then you can split out necessary costs (accessibility, etc.) vs. costs that need to be cut (school is paying admin too much, etc.)
"You cannot dismantle the only mail service that is OBLIGATED to deliver mail to every address. "
You can if you obligate other national carriers to do that.
The fact is the world has changed dramatically in the last few decades and the kinds of things that are sent are completely different, demands are different, technology has changed rapidly. I don't get anything other than junk mail from the public service, I wish it would stop.
I think an optimal solution might be to actually semi-privatize the USPS, by floating a small % ownership (say 10%) on public exchange, letting them set their own prices and strategy, which would remove recent Republican meddling - and - also remove their impetus as well, as it would be a 'self sustaining' entity, still mostly owned by the Government.
Having a % float would provide some measure of market feedback, this is a tactic used by some very wealthy families to give external measures to their CEO's and have some degree of accountability. I believe Bertelsmann uses this kind of setup.
Aside from that, it could very well be possible to require private carriers to have the same, national coverage in order to be considered 'national carriers' a status which they should have to have to be able to bid on certain contracts etc..
'National Carriers' could have access to things like mail boxes in buildings, and other things, possibly even co-use of USPS facilities, much like government has required last-mile fibre operators to share their gear with competitors (i.e. CLECs).
It's not anti-rural sentiment. I understand the case for subsidizing infrastructure for underserved populations, but I think the postal service does this at too great a cost.
For example:
Every day my mailbox is filled with paper that goes directly into the recycle bin. USPS representatives sell direct marketing services to businesses who send all this junk mail because it's so inexpensive to send.
Imagine if your ISP was affiliated with a spammer. This is effectively what the USPS does and it wastes lots of time, paper, and other resources.
The reason the USPS supports paper spam is simply to help fund its egalitarian mission of delivering mail in spite of too-low prices. The USPS does not pay the cost of recycling the paper or the cost of emptying everyone's mailbox of it every day. These are significant negative externalities.
Instead, why not simply subsidize rural mail by giving residents of rural areas some free stamps every month? It seems that making the rest of us deal with removing unwanted garbage from our mailboxes every day is a horribly inefficient way to achieve the egalitarian objective you cite.
I think it is reasonably clear that anyone advocating privatizing mail is going to have to address the issue of the cost of delivery, either by some kind of subsidization by the government (not necessarily federal.. for example it could be done at the county level to promote people living there) or allowing companies to charge appropriately.
Which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all.
If running a postal service that reaches all of the country is a money losing proposition, that's a terrible reason to privatize it, if you think it's in the national benefit to have a postal service.
Yes? When it comes to delivering first-class mail for cheap, I assume there’s a minimum population density that allows for such a thing to be done cheaply (similar to now) and profitably. The US has nearly an order of magnitude lower population density than Germany, I’d bet there’s a threshold somewhere in that range where it wouldn’t be possible to deliver a mail anywhere in the US by a private company for similar rates that everyone currently enjoys now.
My whole argument is that the utility of keeping the USPS as it sits now with equitable pricing outweighs any potential efficiency or profit gained by private actors. If you disagree, that’s fine. I’ll disagree with your position that we should privatize the USPS, it will fuck over rural people to the benefit of ... who now? Are you heavily weighed down by purchasing .55 cent stamps? Because market rate first class mail would fuck over poor rural people pretty hard for almost no gain. The utility outweighs any efficiency or profit gains offered by private companies.
Not every damn thing needs to be privatized, some things are better left as government entities because the benefit to the public is greater than any profit motive. Letter delivery is one of those things.
"It does not need to have a profit and thinking about it in that sense is absurd."
No - your ideologically loaded responses is maybe the 'absurd' thing here.
You've made arbitrary comparisons to 'Healthcare' or 'NASA' without providing any basis for why 'some things are public and some are private'.
You do also realize that almost all Healthcare services are provided by private entities? Even in fully socialised markets like Canada 'the Government' does not actually 'provide' service, they regulate, and do the 'insurance' layer.
Parcel delivery does not have any of the systematic characteristics of something that might make it a public good.
While there's nothing inherently wrong with having a public delivery service - there is definitely something wrong if is not self sustaining, and effectively subsidises some businesses and not others.
It would be better if there were 3 regular, national carriers, with reasonable regulations.
""Everything needs to make a profit" is straight out of right wing talking points. The purpose, of course, is to psyop all of us into privatizing everything,"
Conspiracy theories are not arguments.
Also - this idea that the USPS is 'forced to pay retirement 50 years ahead' is essentially a canard - a purposefully misrepresented falsehood.
The USPS for the most part - was required to fund its pensions in almost the same manner any private entity would. [1]
The notion that the USPS was burdened by some deal to have to pay '50 years in advance' is basically a lie.
You can read the legislation yourself right here [2] and here [3]. You'll note there is no mention of '50 years'.
There is no real reason for the US Government to provide mail delivery, when it could achieve the same results through legislation and via private services.
There is a commenter below who uses as 'evidence' the fact that UPS and Fedex do not 'deliver everywhere' as proof that they cannot deliver everywhere.
This again - is a myth. That UPS and FedEx do not deliver everywhere mostly implies they don't see the margins there today. Were the USPS not to exist, and, were they required to deliver by law, then they probably could.
> I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”
You can't see how kneecapping the USPS might help FedEx, UPS, and Amazon?
The point of making the USPS pre-fund their pension obligations was to be able to turn around and say "look at the horrible state of their finances, government is clearly so inefficient, we should privatize it".
It's simple to establish that rural delivery has a higher cost to the USPS than city delivery does. As you've pointed out, cutting delivery days to rural citizens also bears a high cost in the view of those with diminished service.
It seems the exceedingly sensible thing to do would simply be for the government to subsidize delivery to the costliest areas. Unfortunately that would mean taxpayer dollars supporting the USPS and that's an idea that's seemingly untenable to rural communities.
Hopefully a solution can be found in all of this. I certainly can't see one, but I'm hopeful that it'll find a way.
> USPS is a service, not a business. Do we look at how profitable the US military is or schools?
If it was purely a service and designed to be in the red, we wouldn't be having this debate here.
No, it's a quasi-private business that manages itself horrendously, and requires routine capitol injection via Tax Payer Bailouts.
As a service? USPS is more of a jobs service - employing thousands of unproductive employees that will coast until retirement then enjoy part of that enormous pension.
This is how a lot of subsidies work in the US. City-dwellers subsidize rural communities.
> you think USPS is more efficient than a private sector alternative would be?
Likely any cost savings non-rural people would see is at the cost of pensions, employee benefits, or other potential stones-to-be-bled. If USPS is privatized, these things will be strangled to death.
> Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
No, I don't think so. This is just a backdoor to make privatization easier: whenever some state either mismanages their postal service or simply can't keep it afloat, we'll be at the cutting block again. Furthermore, there's obvious potential efficiencies an interstate mail network has compared to a state-level mail network. The "decentralization" here just necessitates more communication overhead, potentially different laws requiring re-sorting, and a bunch of other potential headaches.
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