All revenues were to come from POSTAGE ~ and they did that quite successfully over 3.5 decades.
Then one day Olympia Snow proposed that one way to balance the federal budget would be to TAP USPS in a way that would meet legal requirements (no tax on postage) and yet not seem to interfere with postal ops.
The idea was to claim that the 5.3 billion bucks per year ripped out of the hide of the Postal Service was actually a necessary contribution to OPM for "future" medical insurance costs for postal employees. That way the Postal Rate Commission would need to raise postage rates to cover that cost ~ since it was all germane to USPS operations.
Well, it didn't work out at all. The "postal employees" who would be covered were 75 years in the future ~ that's 3/4 of a century!
Not a one of them was actually employed by USPS in the here and now.
The PRC simply refused to authenticate the legitimacy of what amounted to a tax on postal operations ~ to wit, a STAMP TAX.
I think we fought a war on the issue and this funny little foreign woman sitting in the Senate of course has no memory of it (even though she looks old enough to have been a cannon ball carrier for Molly Pitcher herself).
The other senators thought that was all peachy keen because, lo and behold, it was all invisible and the Republicans then running the Senate couldn't possibly be accused of RAISING TAXES!
Alas, they not only raised taxes, they forgot to fix the rest of the law so that they could be collected. The consequence is the collector of those taxes ~ if they were ever collected ~ the USPS ~ was directed to start paying up!
That spent them right into near bankruptcy and then the Great Obama Recession happened, business fell off the planet, business' advertising went with business, and USPS mail volumes dropped like a rock.
At the same time the law prohibited USPS from closing facilities.
Hmm.
So, although USPS is hardly in a position to bail out the entire government, it's doing more than its share, and eventually, they run out of money and need to shut down.
At the same time Department of Education, which wastes more money than it costs USPS to run nationwide and serve everyone, is UNAFFECTED by any of this.
Your money you pay for stamps isn't really going to move your mail. It's going into the US Treasury and being given to Kathleen Sebalius to persecute the Catholics and Baptists.
Very interesting! I did not know all of that!