Thus, the USPS. Look at what union power can achieve!
I've seen proposals to drop Saturday delivery, go to delivery on just Mon, Wed and Fri, and close a bunch of post offices.
IMHO, all of that and more will be needed to put the USPS on sound financial footing.
The unions will have to learn that they must give up a lot to keep the USPS alive.
Screw ‘em—we don’t need USPS anymore. Privatize it and whatever little legitimate business is there will be handled competently by the private sector.
Give the business to UPS and FedEx.
Workers in the private sector have lost jobs by the millions; government workers have ADDED jobs. This makes sense!?!?!?!?!
No.
Private or public, your mail will still be delivered by unions.
UPS and Fed Ex both deliver to my post office to help them out.
When the USPS was spun off from being a cabinet position as the Post Office Department, the argument was that it would be self supporting. I don’t think it ever has been, but since US Taxpayers are also propping up GM and Chrysler (imported from Detroit, Michiganstan), not to mention a myriad of tin-horn dictators around the world, who knows? At least they render a service.
When the rationale for saving it is that old folks look forward to their junk mail, as harry reid said the other day, you know it’s not worth saving.
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“...announced losses of:
$8.5 billion in 2010,
$5.5 billion in 2011 and
$3 billion in the first quarter of 2012...”
Looks sort of like *progress*. But it’s “creative accounting”, actually; just shifting losses and hiding costs.
We blinked about 3 years back (after we elected Obama). GM & Chrysler 'beat' the USPS in reaching "nothing more than Union-Supported Government Agency" status.
The USPS leaves me deeply conflicted.
As an organization, it is screwed up, but nobody including UPS or FED EX is capable of replicating its services in the near future.
Even with new technology replacing many of its functions, it is still too important to just abandon..
-—— drop Saturday delivery, go to delivery on just Mon, Wed and Fri———
Ammendment:
Deliver mail on a staggered basis.
Everybody gets mail three days a week. Some areas on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Other areas on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Mail comes to boxes 5 days a week.
I already pay FedEx far more to send any mail that I care about. I refuse to use our current postal service for any important mail that I can send or receive otherwise.
I am very tired of trying to find out what happened to yet another piece of missing postal mail, and would just rather pay a bit more to get better service.
The Post Office needs to continue to exist, but it does need restructuring. It is a huge international treaty obligation that took an incredible and unique effort to create, so that the nations of the world can correspond with each other. And this is still a vital purpose, not changed by the Internet. It could not be recreated today.
Probably its best function to be preserved and perhaps enlarged is as a “secure courier” of legal and official paperwork. In the future this could include everything from bonded courier and process server, but mostly to be the transporter of government paperwork, going and coming.
But no more junk mail and competition for national first class. They would still control international first class.
Starting in the 1960s he could see what affirmative action hiring and political appointments were going to do to the organization. It all came true.
Just try to get a community mailbox which has been vandalized replaced and you will see how bad things are...
The last year we lived in Seattle, we lived in a condo preparing for our permanent move to KY. We’d go to the mailbox once a week and find it so full it was compressed. It was ALL junk mail pretty much every time.
Now at our farm in KY, we still get our mail every week. Usually it is EMPTY.
Preserving Saturday delivery made no sense. And now that everyone we know uses eMail, text, facebook, etc., we haven’t got a personal letter in well over a decade. And all of our bills are paid online and show up on email.
We (my family) really have no need for the USPS. On the rare occasion I need to mail something letter sized, I can pay FedEx a little more to deliver it.
Like the public school system, the USPS was a critical element of the 19th century that made this country great, but it has outlived its usefulness.
Contemplate a world with no USPS. How would it affect you personally? How less convenient would your life be?
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”.
US Constitution
90% of mail I receive is junk mail. Everything of any importance is accessible online. Throw it on the scrap heap, along with the EPA, Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Democrats, of course, will play the race and class card, claiming that the poor and minorities don’t have the internet access that the rich and white do. This is a smoke screen for their real motive-protecting unions and unnecessary government jobs. I see the USPS going the way of newspapers and magazines—casualties of the electronic age.
They can, and should, start with making everyone more accountable. How about tracking systems that work? And when a piece of mail that has a tracking number doesn’t get delivered, how about something more than a “we’ll get back to you in a month or so, but we probably won’t know where it went.”
I have, in the past year, received multiple pieces of mail that show as undelivered in the USPS system. Likewise, there are more than a few that never showed up at my mail drop that they claim were delivered - when no mail courier ever appeared.
Meanwhile, tracking of UPS, FedEx and even DHL packages has been 100% accurate in the sense that they know where the package was delivered and where it might have gone “off the grid” as a place to start looking for it.
“Is the U.S. Postal Service Worth Saving?”
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If ANYONE has to ask...dump ‘em !!!!!
...and takes approximately the same amount of time...
There's nothing like government-subsidized union inefficiency.
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If USPS had been working properly, UPS & FedEx would never have existed -- much less prospered.