I live in a suburban/rural area outside a mid sized city of 200,000. There are 6 small post offices within 5 miles of my house. All of them could be closed and their retail operations subcontracted to card shops, hardware stores, UPS, stores or other private retail operations.
Saturday delivery is a long needed cost savings that should result in significant savings. Retiree medical benefits should also be eliminated for current employees. Most private sector companies have dropped retiree medical over the last decade. In suburban/urban areas delivery at the door should be eliminated and replaced with curbside boxes (like in rural areas or in unsafe neighborhoods with community stations with locked individual boxes such as those employed in many newer planned communities.
Congress “privatized” the post office years ago but tied the hands of management so it couldn’t execute the kinds of cost savings measures that would result in the elimination of large numbers of jobs or reduce employee benefits. The inability of Congress to privatize this agency successfully suggests there will never be meaningful reductions in agency bureaucracies.
The Left leapt on the privatization bandwagon and then muddled it with regulations that castrated competition. Now privatization has a bad name.
In Chicago the Regional Transportation Authority and the Chicago Transit Authority regularly abandon bus routes, but by law, by law, you cannot replace them with a private bus service. No doctor’s office or hospital can open without government permission. Health care is ruled by government and hasn’t been free market in a half century.
Over and over again government has failed in its stated goals and made things worse. A captive media and pro-government school system keeps this information out of the minds of the people.
Government doesn’t work, yet we’re trained from Kindergarten that if something is broken government will fix it.
Congress never privatized the postal service ~ it’s still a government agency AND costs virtually nothing in terms of tax dollars. In contrast, Department of Education, which does nothing of value, costs $78 billion per year ~ far more than postal costs paid by folks who pay postage.