Is the U.S. Postal Service Worth Saving?

Town Hall Magazine ^ | April 29, 2012 | Kevin Glass

[upchuck]

Technology’s rapid advance over the past few decades has brought an era of unprecedented communication among Americans. With video chat, people separated by thousands of miles can interact as if they’re in the same room. Small business owners can pay bills with the click of a mouse. The original online communications technology—e-mail—has become so much more. And there’s a government agency that is not happy about this

The U.S Postal Service is in crisis. Mail volume peaked in 2006, and they have been losing business—and more importantly, money—ever since. As an arm of the federal government, taxpayers should be worried about the financial health of an agency that is supposed to be, in theory, self-financing. Several congressional Democrats and the U.S. Postal Service workers’ unions are waging a losing war against technology to try to survive in an e-economy without cutting jobs or service.

A trio of government unions have formed together to push back against the tide of technological progress. The American Postal Workers Union, National Association of Letter Carriers and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union are all involved in the fight to drain more taxpayer money from the government and funnel it toward federal workers. Unless substantial action is taken, they’re going to succeed, and the once-great post office will become nothing more than a union-supported government agency that bleeds red ink year after year.

Post office reform is possible. There are people fighting in Congress to turn the tide and streamline the delivery agency into a more efficient service for the benefit of the whole country, but it will take effort and the political will to overcome Democrats and government unions committed to bleeding taxpayers dry for the sake of federal workers.

What Went Wrong?

Conservatives often argue that an inefficient federal program isn’t a legitimate function of the government. Not so with the Postal Service. Founded in 1775 by the Continental Congress, mail delivery was written into Article I of the Constitution. Through two centuries of legislation and regulation, the Postal Service has a government-forced monopoly on many different types of mail delivery and is designed to subsidize rural and long-distance delivery—sending a first-class letter is the same price no matter if it’s going across the street or across the country.

In 1970, Congress passed a package of reforms that turned the post office from the United States Post Office Department, a cabinet-level bureaucracy, into the United States Postal Service, a government-owned corporate-like agency. Before, the Post Office Department wasn’t charged with balancing its budget and self-funding. However, with the transition into an independent agency that had a legal monopoly on mail delivery, the new Postal Service was supposed to be able to fund itself through prices charged for mail delivery.

The turn of the century is where the Postal Service’s real trouble started, as its business-like organization proved resistant to change in the face of an evolving marketplace.

As electronic communications have advanced, the post office has been challenged in different ways. Telegrams provided for near-instantaneous transmission of messages, and the telephone allowed people to actually talk to each other over great distances. However, no technology gave postal mail such an existential crisis as the Internet. For all the previous technology had done for communications, much business still needed to be conducted with paper communications—until the Internet. The online age brought the ability to transit massive amounts of data across the world and the seeds of the destruction of mail delivery.

Mail delivery peaked in 2006 after having been relatively stagnant for the previous decade. It’s now been on a downward decline, spelling massive financial loss for the Postal Service and looking unlikely to recover. The Postal Service announced losses of $8.5 billion in 2010, $5.5 billion in 2011 and $3 billion in the first quarter of 2012. What’s more, due to a 2006 law that charged the agency to be more responsible with its accounting practices, its budget is going to look worse and worse.

[WalterSkinner]

..my father retired from the USPS

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...

[cuban leaf]

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?

[cuban leaf]

Actually, once a week would be fine. Eliminate 4/5 of the mail carriers and just use the ones you keep to hit all the neighborhoods in the five days they work.

If it HAS TO BE there in a day or so, just use FedEx.

[cuban leaf]

--...took an incredible and unique effort to create...--

So did the Arizona. But we've moved on. Like battleships, the USPS is SOOOOOO 20th century.

[cuban leaf]

—...but you obviously
do not live in an isolated area where you depend on a post office box in the nearest town to receive mail.—

I do. We almost never get mail. And anything important comes via FedEx.

[US Navy Vet]

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

[Dr. Sivana]

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.

Very important point. Large as UPS and FedEx are, they can go under as fast as Enron. In Canada, postal workers on strike have been known to destroy mail, which to this Yank seems just short of desecration and at least violation of a sacred trust.

UPS and Fedex don't have to deliver to nearly every address every day. You could remove the monopoly status for non-emergency first class mail. Then, what would happen is that the new private carriers would cherry pick. The private company would make deals with, say, utility companies, and deliver all of the electric bill for ComEd in the Chicago area for 20 cents, but will not deliver anything at all outside of Illinois. This would create upward price pressure on the USPS, that still has to deliver the letter to Aunt Millie in Fog Breath, Alaska or to Sergeant Jones in Kabul, Afghanistan for the same 45 cents normally charged for those thousands of utility bills that are no longer sent. You could go to a new model where the military subsidizes the APO mail, and the folks in Alaska, Hawaii and Death Valley are going to cost more to reach. That seems like a step backwards to me.

[AlexW]

“We almost never get mail.”
______________________________________

I guess being a hermit with no business, bills or services does have advantages.
That is much like my life, but I am retired on a beach
in the tropics.

[Freestate316]

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.

[cuban leaf]

—I guess being a hermit with no business, bills or services does have advantages.
That is much like my life, but I am retired on a beach
in the tropics.—

I call our place “tropical paradise without the ocean”. And since both of us have had our fill of the ocean, that is a good thing. ;-)

But to the point, we have bills and services, and a business. We have no need for the USPS. EVERYTHING is done by computer with the rare exception of sending or receiving a FedEx letter or UPS package.

We don’t need the USPS at all at our place. It could be eliminated and the main thing I would notice is that I don’t have to twist the riding mower around the mailbox post any more.

[Spktyr]

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.

[gunnyg]

“Is the U.S. Postal Service Worth Saving?”
***************************

If ANYONE has to ask...dump ‘em !!!!!

[TXnMA]

"...sending a first-class letter is the same price no matter if it’s going across the street or across the country."

...and takes approximately the same amount of time...

There's nothing like government-subsidized union inefficiency.

~~~~~~~~~

If USPS had been working properly, UPS & FedEx would never have existed -- much less prospered.

[OldPossum]

This is strictly an aside and has only a very peripheral relationship to the article, but I just wanted to point out that when you send an email to a company in, say, protest about something, it likely is dismissed. OTOH, if you write an old-fashioned, well-written letter, I would bet that gets much more attention.

[OldPossum]

I think you need to put a bit more thought into “Screw ‘em—we don’t need USPS anymore.”

Thought? You're asking for thought from one of these shoot-from-the-hips Freepers? Really, now.

[AlexW]

“Thought? You’re asking for thought from one of these shoot-from-the-hips Freepers? Really, now.”
__________________________________________

Yes, I know there are some amazing FReepers who can
do with or without many things...More power to them.
Since I have been outside of the USSA for almost ten years
now, I am unaware that everything in life now comes by internet, UPS, or FedEx, including bills, magazines, money and all those pesky greeting cards.
As I enter my senior years, I now see why we have to die, haha.

[dinodino]

If you receive mail which is critical, you can pay extra to get it. I don’t get anything in my mailbox anymore that’s useful, other than greeting cards. Most of the bills are electronic. I do not believe that the existing mail service actually needs to be replaced. Certainly it’s not profitable the way it’s run right now, so that should tell you that something is fundamentally wrong with the business.

Who says you have to have 24/7 access? Maybe if you need that, you could pay extra for the privilege. If monthly delivery is good enough for you, then it should be at a discounted price.

I have thought through my “screw ‘em” comment quite thoroughly, and I stand behind it.

[dinodino]

USPS don’t want accountability. The USPS “POD” is a complete joke. Fedex can track an envelope from Osaka to Memphis to PNG and they can tell you exactly where it scanned in at each point. USPS personnel apparently couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a road map, much less find your “Priority” envelope.

[Publius Valerius]

Yeah, but the idea behind making the postal service a monopoly is that the low cost deliveries subsidize the high cost ones, and it all works out in the end.

If you allow competition for first class mail, then companies will only deliver on the profitable routes, leaving the rural routes—money losers—to the USPS. That doesn’t work.

There are a lot more wastes of govt money to worry about than the post office, which actually provides low cost, reliable service to every person in the country.

[Publius Valerius]

I send a lot of letters and packages in my job. For what it’s worth, I have never had USPS lose a letter. I can’t say the same for DHL or FedEx. No experience with UPS.

FedEx is fast, and I like FedEx. But I dont count on it to deliver on time. You’re right: they can tell you right where it is, but if that is in Memphis and not your destination, that’s not all that helpful.