The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]
inthepublicinterest.org
inthepublicinterest.org
Ellen Brown's has written a copy pieces advocating for postal banking.
What We Could Do with a Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure that Doesn’t Cost Taxpayers a Dime - https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do-with-a-po... (2013)
This piece concludes by suggesting the postal service is being looted so its property portfolio can be sold off.
Actually, the banking service is also "universal" (every post office provide the service), allowing very remote places to have banking and postal service in one place. So even in remote places where it is not profitable for <bigBank> to open an office, there are always a post office around. The financial services are broad, bank account, checks, loans, credit cards, stocks/bonds, currency exchange, etc.
Another service is notary (the postal office can certify some official papers), civil services (the postal office can process ID/passport renewal), and you can pay your taxes or fines too :)
Combined with a solid IT infrastructure, a tiny post office can do a lot, with few employees. A lot more than just delivering spam or even parcel.
The more I learn about Feinstein the more unhappy I become.
https://lawandcrime.com/politics/feinstein-once-pushed-for-t...
I don't think Feinstein is that politically craven. She has a spine, and a relatively rigid one at that. Rather, her poor judgment, such as it is, is all her own.
The Koch brothers and other anti-government radicals bank on the political disaffection that such historical revisionism generates. If every politician is a stooge, then there's no virtue in politics or government. Feinstein is no stooge, and while I wouldn't vote for her in most years, IMO she deserves respect as a strong, steadfast, and effective leader who almost incidentally blew--and continues to blow--many stereotypes of women out of the water. (And you can be all of those things, BTW, while also having flaws and a history of mistakes.) She definitely doesn't deserve a cheap character assassination.
I do think there is still some debate about the timelines involved, though. A 1984 article in the Harvard Crimson indicates that the Fort Sumter flag was raised prior to the California 100 flag: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1984/5/9/a-viable-alterna...
But the Snopes article indicates that Bradley brought down the California 100 flag in favor of the Fort Sumter flag.
I didn’t intend to “revise history” by my post. Hopefully no one takes it that way.
For sure one wonders exactly what was going through Feinstein's mind during those 3 days. She's a deft, successful politician so I have little doubt there was some self-serving motivations at play. But her defiance and obtuse expression of authority in the face of a lawless action (however just) is textbook Feinstein. And it taking only 3 days for her to order its removal is fast even by today's standards, and even in San Francisco.
Even libertarians and conservatives will I believe find something to agree with here as your city and state tax dollars probably go towards servicing private bank fees which could be eliminated by your city or state chartering their own bank and could be further reduced by them offering traditional "meat and potato" style loans to small main-street style businesses at reasonable rates.
The city making a few honest dollars in an open capitalist marketplace to reduce the citizen's tax burden I think would be welcome by by ideological libertarians, conservatives, liberals, socialists, all the major branches. No coercion, no obligation, just more competition, this time to the benefit of easing your tax burden.
- It's unlikely that the government will regulate itself and its competitors fairly, and it's generally unlikely that the government will hold itself to account (as it often does for private entities).
- The government is likely to set up barriers to entry, to prevent competition. This is the case for the postal service, which has a monopoly on first-class mail.
- The government is likely to subsidize its 'option', either directly or indirectly, such as by having the government 'sole-source' services from its 'competitor'.
This isn't reality, it's just some artificial classification system placed upon society. It's a hypothetical thought experiment based on fictional categories. For example, The Irvine Group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company) is a Private For Profit company that Governs the City of Irvine - the distinction between the two groups are totally imaginary and fictional. They only exist on a chalkboard.
I'm talking about people who call themselves libertarian who do not participate in this classification dance
There's a historical reality of actual real world public banks and there's been consistent and nearly universal support for their continuation across party lines. Theoretical thought experiments aren't needed - we can simply look at observed reality.
Maybe you should actually read Mrs. Brown's material as I suggested before forming an opinion on her work. I dunno, just a suggestion.
Municipalities organized as corporations are not unique to California, but the "inc." at the end of the name doesn't change anything. A government is an organization granted a monopoly (or oligopoly) on the legitimate use of force in a designated geographic area. For a discussion on the philosophical problems with governments as such, I recommend reading "The Problem of Political Authority" by Michael Huemer.
explicit, implicit, loose, tight, chartered, unchartered, natural?
> granted
by whom, to whom, under what authority, given by what, enforced by what and applicable to what and whom
> a monopoly (or oligopoly)
determined and defined by whom? enforced by whom?
> on the legitimate
same question
> use of
arbitrary, restrained, indefinite, transparent, accountable, proportionate? what are we talking about here?
> force
define force. is it physical force? psychological? threats? persuasion? What about the physical force in the seizing of property?
> in a designated
defined by whom? universally acknowledged? how? by what mechanism? where?
> geographic
physical? virtual? what types of legal fictions?
> area
contiguous? porous? uniform in space and in time?
I can use that and make it apply to just about anything by answering those questions differently. That's why it's utterly arbitrary.
I've read your authors - they use superficial theoretical chalkboard constructed non-realities to scaffold up their taxonomies. It's not real.
That's why this style of libertarianism has exactly zero agreed upon historical examples. Because they aren't describing reality. Their supposedly "concrete" definitions conveniently move and morph based on the context.
The liberals look at europe and say "yeah, that's pretty much what we mean"
The socialists look at cuba, ussr, and china and say "well, ok, we want things to be less brutal, but ok, yes this matches our definition (shameface)"
The anarchist look at the paris commune of 1871, the Seattle general strike of 1919, occupy wall street, etc and say "yes, this is what we mean".
The (honest) conservatives look at the middle east and turkey and say "yes, this is what we want, only with a different religion and more equality of opportunity"
But the libertarians are just there with their chalkboard because there is no agreed reality that undergirds it. The largest consensus I've found is Friedman's "The Miracle of Chile", which took place under a literal dictatorship, but because their terms are arbitrarily defined, this isn't actually a problem. A military police state that seized people in their sleep and rolled tanks through the street somehow gets shoe-horned into the examples section ... that's how free-floating the categories are.
There's a different form of libertarianism that doesn't have such issues: "When a choice need be made, always tend towards individual freedom". This one, although not free from issues, can't fall victim to the deck-stacking category dance and purely arbitrary construction of the force/monopoly/government style.
The Heritage Foundation does this all the time. Depending on whose paying the bills they will use the exact same arguments to draw different sets of conclusions on the exact same topics. They're just tools of arbitrary application It's a box that fits anything you'd like
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_the...
USPS becoming a bank could happen in the US and it would be great for the company, because the Antitrust system in the US is a joke and it would never stop it, IMHO.
I mean, I can't because I sold some bitcoin via Bank of America 4-years ago. Someone stole my info, I reported it as fraud and BoA reported me for fraud -- and all my bank accounts closed. And they refuse to fix it.
Singapore's postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company[1].
The UK's postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company[2].
Germany's postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company[3].
Japan's postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company[4].
I'm also yet to hear a convincing argument as to why the USPS enjoys a monopoly in first class parcel mail. That is to say, sure let's keep USPS state owned / public, but why can't FedEx/UPS/Amazon/DHL compete with the USPS?
[1] https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/quote/S08.SI/
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rmg?countrycode=...
[3] https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/equity/deutsche-post-ag
[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/6178.T?p=6178.T&.tsrc=fin-sr...
Is Amazon going to run ships around the Great Lakes to deliver mail to vessels moving between ports?
Is FedEx going to send a truck an a four-hour round-trip to deliver a single letter to someone on an indian reservation for 50¢?
Is UPS going to charter bush planes to deliver mail to remote outposts in Alaska, Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands?
There are post offices so far out in the middle of nowhere that while they have a concrete pad for handicapped parking because it's required by the ADA, no customers ever arrive by car, so there's also hitching posts for people's horses, which is the primary mode of transportation. I don't see Amazon doing that. It'll just say, "Wait 20 years for your mail while we work the bugs out of our super-cool drone delivery service!"
It's possible to half agree with those political factions while still wanting to keep government subsidized public mail.
For example, if they want access to consumer mailboxes in an area, they need to cover 100% of the addresses USPS covers without routing packages through USPS. That way, they don't have the ability to surgically cherry-pick the most lucrative aspects and leave USPS with the crappy bits due to its mandates.
Given that USPS and FedEx are roughly $10 for a 3-day letter, I don't know which carriers would even want to deliver paper mail.
That strikes me as unreasonable. We don't impose that kind of a requirement on package delivery on one's porch...why should we impose that requirement on paper mail delivery in one's mailbox? In no communication enterprise do we ever require 100% coverage. Markets finds some equilibrium with global, national, and local players coexisting. The same can be true for state-run enterprises.
And we absolutely do place similar requirements on new entrants in monopoly enterprises. I'm thinking about things like 911 service on cell phones/VOIP phones. Basically, we all need the "new mail" to work pretty much like the old mail it's replacing. It's in nobody's interest for an inferior system to eat all the profit and drive the existing system into collapse.
No, because using planes to deliver to regional distribution centers is much more efficient.
> Is FedEx going to send a truck an a four-hour round-trip to deliver a single letter to someone on an indian reservation for 50¢?
The USPS does not deliver mail directly to the majority of reservation residents. Most have to fetch their mail at the closest office, which could be upwards of 1 hr away from them. This is because most reservation residences don't actually have an address (which also prevents them from registering to vote, which is another related issue).
> Is UPS going to charter bush planes to deliver mail to remote outposts in Alaska, Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands?
The USPS doesn't either. The USPS's Alaska Bypass has a minimum order weight of 1000 lbs, it's designed for retailers. The USPS does not serve normal consumers in very rural areas with standard mail features.
How do planes and distribution centers get mail to people at sea for months at a time?
The USPS does not deliver mail directly to the majority of reservation residents
You're not wrong. But there are plenty of people in remote places on the rez who do get mail hours from the nearest trading post. Just because they're not the "majority" of people doesn't mean they don't deserve to be served.
The USPS does not serve normal consumers in very rural areas with standard mail features.
Either you and I define "rural" differently, or you haven't spent as much time in rural places as I have.
The UK is the size of the state of Oregon and about five times as densely populated. The UK also has a much more powerful central regulatory apparatus -- there is no US body that has as much power over private carriers as Ofcom has over Royal Mail.
Exactly.
> there is no US body that has as much power over private carriers as Ofcom has over Royal Mail
I thought regulating inter-state commerce and especially mail was something the US federal government has historically done?
In fact isn't there even a federal law enforcement agency specifically for it?
What's also significant is that Royal Mail privatization is less than a decade old. From a policy perspective, it's still an experiment. It doesn't actually have any competition for letter delivery. That Royal Mail has survived despite the lack of a statutory monopoly does not mean that the same would be true of USPS.
But also regardless of which is better, why is it all-or-nothing? Why can't UPS/Amazon/FedEx/DHL ALSO co-exist with the USPS? Today, they are prohibited from delivering any first class mail to a mailbox, by law.
Now, why does it have exclusivity for letter service? I don't know the history.
I'd rather look at how it can do an already pretty good job, better. I know I go to USPS when I ship anything.
Why isn't it in the banking business? Why doesn't it operate an official email / Identity Provider? Among other services that a correspondence service, a federal service with the most physical public spaces, could offer?
It specifically grants Congress the power to operate a postal service. Just because they have the power doesn't mean they have to do it.
> I'd rather look at how it can do an already pretty good job, better. I know I go to USPS when I ship anything.
When it comes to packages, USPS vs UPS vs FedEx have their pros/cons, but the options mean that most end user's needs are met, whatever they are. The question is why USPS enjoys a state sanctioned monopoly on paper mail specifically.
I'm curious -- can you link to more detail about this? I've never had trouble sending paper mail through UPS or FedEx. What does the monopoly cover, specifically?
By law, private corporations aren't allowed to deliver anything to your mailbox, only the USPS can.
On the one hand, it seems unfair. On the other hand, since they don't have any cost-competitive offerings, it seems like a non-issue. I'm a big fan of the USPS, but if it looked like FedEx could help push the letter rate down, I would be a fan of revoking that law. (If a private carrier committed to serving 100% of the USPS coverage area.)
It doesn't have exclusivity for letter service. UPS, FedEx, and DHL (among others) will carry letters across the country for you.
Yes, it's going to cost ~$10 to roughly match the service speed of a USPS first-class stamp. But it's available.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/320.6
There are minimums they can charge and some speed requirements.
https://about.usps.com/publications/pub542/pub542_ch5_001.ht...
USPS has to get paid the going rate for postage. But given that no private carriers are within a factor of 10 of USPS pricing, that seems like it's not the barrier here. (Also: much easier to make the argument that the $1.00 letter service from FedEx could be $0.45 if Congress would update the relevant law.)
This really looks like the private carriers have carved off the profitable part (rapid delivery) and leave USPS with the hard, unprofitable part (delivery to 100% of addresses, for $0.55).
As for regular mail, they don't offer that because it's impossible to compete when you have to pay your competitor for every sale you make.
The legacy system is based on the fact that it is public service, equally offered to all citizens, regardless of their gender, race, religion and location. So, it is not a business. A business would focus on the most profitable aspect of the postal service. It would likely not serve some areas, or even discriminate against some people.
I believe, the reason why USPS still has a monopoly in first class parcel mail, it is to satisfy people we claim that USPS should make money. Now, if it was clear for everyone that USPS should not be profitable (like military or education are not profitable), then it would make sense to break all USPS monopolies. Actually, I would argue the other way around, then let's USPS compete also with banks (account, loans, credit cards, stocks/bonds, CDs, etc.), title companies, check cashing business, etc. Which I believe USPS cannot currently. USPS could leverage its geographical coverage to bring banking services to remote areas. I would suggest to combine some services like DMV, so we could renew ID/driver/passports at postal office. We could pay taxes and fine. We could access notary services (titles), etc.
If you want universal postal service to rural areas (not profitable markets), then simply provide it and understand it has a cost like the military and education (as noted above)?
Having said that, having a universal postal service requires physical presence in lots of remote areas. And those remote areas not only lack postal service, but also banking, tax services, and even why not grocery shopping. I do not see why we could not let the postal service provide those extra services, especially in the remote areas. People in big cities would likely have a different bank, they have access to a DMV near by, or supermarket. But, in a remote area, how a retired person can cash his social security ? renew his driver license ? Maybe there is a "service" opportunity that would make those remote post office more sustainable. I do not see why the postal office could not provide other services especially in remote areas where they lack. The physical location of the post office becomes a more valuable asset.
The structure also hints at problems with government run businesses- the PX system avoids all sorts of sales and property taxes and gets reduced or free rent. The commissaries do that and get direct subsidies as well.
Before any service members (or their spouses) go after me, no, I am NOT arguing for any change to the system, just pointing out how existing examples look and work.
The result would be the USPS would not have the revenue to serve the unprofitable regions, and would either be forced to end service in the unprofitable regions or simply collapse.
Sounds like if the problem is that rural mail is socially important, we ought to subsidize it directly.
OTOH, FedEx responded to MAP-21 and similar pension funding laws by getting rid of their pension fund which I suppose isn't something USPS can do as easily. On the third hand, UPS is still able to afford pensions for union employees.
It seems that most observers agree that this is not the case, so it is unclear how you came to the exact opposite understanding. E.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-04/congre... mentions
> The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees' health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make.
The problem is that the USPS monopoly is not as valuable as it used to be as less and less business is conducted by mail. In the long term the government is going to have to subsidize its necessary services, because those services are not and cannot be competitive advantages.
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?
The conclusion does not follow. If it is important that the price of delivery to remote Alaska be cheap, then why not just subsidize it directly?
If I reside in Florida/Hawaii and send mail to Alaska I am presuming that it would get re-routed through intermediate stops. Also people move and mail traffic ebbs and flows through the seasons. So I don't understand how this subsidies would work unless we look at the network as a whole and budget accordingly.
It’s similar in Canada - a number of previously run public services were privatized (DMV equivalent, liquor stores, etc). And the level of service improved dramatically. I remember how awful the DMV was - crappy customer service, limited locations, terrible hours. Now I can go and register my car at 8pm on a Wednesday with a 5 min walk and no line. Many of the Canada Post centers are privately run as well - the big box stores use their employees to run it.
I was kind of shocked to come to the US and see how they’re still stuck where Canada was 30 years ago.
Privatization of the postal service has led to much worse service, closure of postal offices, long delivery times in less densely populated areas (read non profitable), and Loss of mail; to make profit, the companies hire the lowest grade, temp-workers they can get their hands on. Sometimes these people figure it is easier to burn or throw away mail rather than to do the actual work of delivering it.
I disagree. At best, it has been hit or miss. Alberta used to have Alberta Government Telephones (AGT). It was later privatized as Telus. Saskatchewan kept SaskTel a crown corp. The level of service and prices are so much better in Saskatchewan as a result that some Alberta residents pretend to live in Saskatchewan so they can get a Sask mobile plan.
And don't get me started on 407.
This is a state of affairs we need to consider rolling back, not expanding.
If you actually drill down into every tangible thing that’s wrong with America, you’ll find that root causes are actually pretty complicated.
That is a fine thing and I am grateful for it.
Consider any tangible thing that's wrong with America - government mismanagement and regulation are likely to be a part of that equation.
This is a state of affairs we need to consider rolling back, not expanding.
US - 87/sq mi
Germany - 603/sq mi
UK - 725/sq mi
Japan - 862/sq mi
Singapore - 20,446/sq miDoes a pricing system and private enterprise break down in sparsely populated markets?
Clearly things seemed to work when going from 20,000/sq mi to 862/sq mi (2 orders of magnitude). Is the argument that there’s a magical breaking point somewhere between 603 to 87/sq mi?
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.
This is a bold assumption that needs backing, because it would suggest that Germans or Britons would be paying 2 orders of magnitude more on sending paper mail than Singaporeans. It also presupposes that private corporations must absolutely turn a profit on every piece of mail that they deliver to every destination, but that’s not how most enterprises work — there can be sustainable loss leaders. It also presupposes that we ought to subsidize rural paper mail delivery rather than charge the true price, which is also debatable.
> 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.
“I’d bet there’s a threshold”, how do you know that the US isn’t above that threshold?
> equitable pricing
This is also debatable, because the USPS is essentially charging higher rates in denser markets to offset the subsidized rates in sparser markets, which imposes a regressive price increase on poor urban USPS customers. Higher prices mean nothing to rich people. If there’s some social utility to having rural (and not urban) Americans enjoy subsidized first class mail, then why not just subsidize it directly through taxes as opposed to selective price increases, which can be regressive and un-equitable?
> 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.
Is food one of those things? How about clothing and shelter? The profit motive is just an incentive for private entities to provide goods & services. The strongest argument in favor of the profit motive is that resource allocation is superior among private entities relative to government central planning. There are obviously exceptions, like externalities, but those don’t really apply here.
And even if we did decide that there’s a public benefit to providing subsidized mail to rural areas, that’s an excellent argument in favor of keeping a taxpayer subsidized USPS, but not a sufficient one in favor of maintaining its monopoly on paper mail. Especially considering that private corporations already deliver packages to low density rural areas alongside USPS just fine.
No, it’s not. Singapore and the US are both an order of magnitude outside the range of the other 3 countries. I would imagine delivery is cheaper and/or more profitable in Singapore, considering it’s a densely urbanized city-state comprised of multi-tenant housing. Germany, UK, and Japan are all roughly similar in density, and I bet it costs a bit more to mail a letter in Germany than Japan. I also bet it’s profitable in that population density range. It clearly is, since they’re operating private companies!
The US is also vastly larger than any of the referenced countries, and has some huge areas with extremely low density. The population density of all of the land area of the US excluding the Northeast region has a population density of 50/sq mi or less (excluding islands). The US has unique geographical and size challenges that none of the countries listed that have privatized their post offices have.
Clothing, food, and housing haven’t been strictly government provided services ever. This is not a good analogy or argument, sorry.
Also, 55 cents is a not a regressive pricing scheme against the urban poor. 55 cents to mail a letter isn’t going to inconvenience anyone. You’re getting disingenuous here, I’m going to disengage.
One last thing, USPS ends up doing last mile delivery for a lot of rural address UPS and Fedex packages. You’re not arguing in good faith, I’m done.
And on what basis are you betting that an operating private company in America can’t achieve the similar pricing outcomes? Is it pure conjecture?
> Also, 55 cents is not a regressive pricing scheme against the urban poor
Sure, and if that’s your argument, then why can’t a private corporation charge the same and maintain a national parcel mail network if it wanted to? There are loads of industries (airlines, payments, ridesharing) where margins are razor thin, but because of high revenues, there is plenty of incentive to serve remote areas.
> One last thing, USPS ends up doing last mile delivery for a lot of UPS and FedEx packages
While that’s true, this services represents the minority of UPS and FedEx’s total footprint. UPS/FedEx/DHL/Amazon still directly deliver the majority of their packages, even to remote addresses.
Yes, pure conjecture based on the population density data. It’s conjecture on your part to assume it can be done profitably so I guess we’re at an impasse here.
> Sure, and if that’s your argument, then why can’t a private corporation charge the same and maintain a national parcel mail network if it wanted to? There are loads of industries (airlines, payments, ridesharing) where margins are razor thin, but because of high revenues, there is plenty of incentive to serve remote areas.
Two facts support my conjecture that the service of a privatized USPS would not include all current users or heavily impact them via price hikes: We haven’t even wired last-mile high speed internet to everyone, and we don’t have true nationwide cell coverage. What makes you think private mail will be any different?
> While that’s true, this services represents the minority of UPS and FedEx’s total footprint. UPS/FedEx/DHL/Amazon still directly deliver the majority of their packages, even to remote addresses.
At least some of this is subcontracted out to other regional companies, I have a friend that works for a company that has a contract to deliver Fedex packages. It’s functionally the same thing as the USPS doing it, just privatized. I have nothing against parcel delivery being handled by private companies.
I just wish we could all view the mail as a public good that benefits people and is worth keeping around. I feel first-class letters should be treated as something all people should have access to at a cheap flat rate no matter where they live in the US. I also feel that is unlikely to continue if the post office is privatized. We could instead focus on improving the existing system we have to benefit us all.
- Australia Post is a government owned entity.
- Australia Post has a universal service obligation.
- Australia Post is allowed to sell whatever it damned well pleases.
- But, it has a monopoly on only one thing, letters.
- The combination of universal service obligation is a liability of course, but being able to sell whatever it damned well pleases ameliorates it somewhat. Many firms (like banks) farmed out otherwise unprofitable branch functions to Post Offices.
- Australia Post is, and as far as I know has always been profitable.
From what I can tell, the idea that a government run entity is more poorly run than a private one is myth. If the area has open competition, and the government run business makes a profit (this is generally the case in Australia), then it really makes no difference if it's privately run or government owned.
Differences only arise in non-competitive environments. A monopoly owned privately owned business charges like a rent seeking wounded bull. A subsidised government run business could destroy more efficiently run private equivalents, but can be a fine balance - it can also be a way to efficiently subsidise a service that was never going to be supplied privately. Doing it by subsidising private operators is equally fraught - regulatory capture is a thing, privately owned prisons being a poster child for what can go wrong.
They could have been the email address of record for everyone in the US if they just set up a forwarding address for anyone who wanted it.
Heck, they could even do it now.
Imagine having a free foo@me.us email address that someone could only send to if they paid for it, like the way mail works now.
That is the business they should get in to, along with killing all the check cashing places by being a bank for unbanked like they used to be.
But they couldn't keep up with more modern services. Their webmail and storage was laughable compared to Gmail and others, and people moved on. They still operate, but it's basically just for older people who never changed now.
Post office companies can't compete with tech giants on email services.
It's quite astonishing how unreliable USPS is. We frequently see packages get routed to a totally incorrect part of the country, derailing shipments for several days.
Also, it seems like even USPS doesn't know when their packages will arrive. The estimates they give are worse at predicting arrival time than just inputing distance into a simple regression!
For instance, my family's street recently got a public sewer system (to replace septic systems), and the city charged homeowners one-time and recurring fees to cover the expenses of both installation and operation. If the city could not get the homeowners to pay enough to cover the cost of the sewer system, which was a real risk, the system would have been considered a mistake (and a project with similar economic prospects would likely been avoided in the future).
The big-ticket items I pay for as a taxpayer include schools (via local taxes), defense, retirees, and healthcare. None of those cover their expenses, and basically everything else combined is a tiny minority of government expenditure.
(I believe we should more fully fund the non-defense parts of the budget, but let's not pretend they net out in the in-years.)
It doesn't have to turn a 'profit' in the literal sense, but it needs to make more money than their current spending because they have to pay future pensions.
Though, overall, this has been a long arc of slowly trying different ways to gut or kill the program in the last ~40 years.
[0] https://mailingsystemstechnology.com/article-4596-The-US-Rem...
The best way to help USPS is to use them as your default shipping method: do so.
At some point the wealthy and political in the US might have somewhat acted in the interest of the American people. But now it feels like almost every move is to the detriment of the average person.
If things continue like this, America is in real trouble.
The family has been fucking the US and world long before Trump was elected. They have a history of funding fake climate change science in order to push favorable legislation for the O&G industry.
Anything that might benefit society (healthcare, social support, ...), they have fought against or funded a PAC to do their dirty work.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-ch...
[1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jel.20181502
[2] https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_rakove_reviews_dem....
[3] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/14/15967788/democrac....
/s
Imagine we had to deliver a vaccine to everyone within a week. The USPS knows everyone's address and where people live. They would be the go to institution to do this.
>The federal agency plays a crucial role in U.S. supply chains, commerce, and basic communication—which email simply cannot replace—by processing and delivering nearly 500 million pieces of mail on an average day.
But I did have a number of questions like,
Wouldn't it be bad if we abolished the post office since there's always been one in my neighborhood?
Why does this person have a particular issue with a quasi-governmental agency that is a rounding-error in the federal budget? What about the trillions in defense and deficit spending?
Isn't 90% of what comes to my mailbox spam that I just forward on to the landfill?
Do most other countries have a public postal service? Why or why not.
Don't I avoid the post-office at all costs unless there's an automated kiosk that happens not to be out of service?
Why is this on Hacker News?
It's an interesting topic. It's generated a few 100 comments already proving that. If HN were just about the latest Rust release and some new startup CEO's deep thoughts, I probably wouldn't come here 5x a day
No one knows for sure. This person also has issues with other tiny pieces of the federal budget, such as the CPB.
Various theories are advanced, such as political strategy (kill mail-in-ballots, NPR is seen as leaning slightly left) or profiteering (the USPS has a large pension fund, perhaps an appealing target for a corporate raid).
The USPS could be improved but struggles primarily due to active efforts to kill it off. But it's a wonderful idea of a service that definitely should exist and be improved. What's next to kill off? Libraries? Public schools? The USPS, libraries, public schools provide basically guaranteed service to anyone, anywhere. They're wonderful institutions. Are they perfect? No. But very few institutions are, and these provide a helpful service to people. We should focus on improving them instead of spending so much money to kill them.
I've learned that the USPS has free package pickup since someone is basically guaranteed to be in your neighborhood every day, which has been a wonderful service during this viral breakout. By having USPS pickup my small packages, it keeps me out of their stores away from other people and employees. I simply purchase a label online and schedule the free pickup, next day if it's a weekday. It's a minimum of $11 for UPS to come pickup your package at a residential address, even if they're already coming to your address for another delivery that same day.
Edit: I am not saying it’s a right thing to do, I am just trying to list a possible reason why billionaires might try to fight against it, per OP question
This comes back to voice vs. exit, which was being discussed on HN yesterday.[1]
It's greed, simple as that. These people are corporatists that believe if there's money to be made, they should be allowed to regardless of the ethical consequences.
https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a...
There is no regulation for instance on the cost of soda, but it is not priced as high as the market can bear. Soda is incredibly cheap and requires no government interference to be cheap.
UPS on the other hand pays income tax, pays property tax, pays higher wages, fully funds their pension plan, and does not have access to the same zero or low interest treasury loans that the USPS does and still makes a profit AND delivers more parcels every year than the USPS.
Citation needed? A quick search suggests that post-pension-debacle, the USPS has lost money every year, to the tune of several billion dollars. Pre-pension-debacle, things were mixed; most years they made a decent profit, some years they lost some money, though much less than they do post-pension-debacle.
According to this report by they feds they've been operating at a loss for most years since 2008. $2.1B loss in 2018.
https://www.prc.gov/sites/default/files/reports/FY%202018%20...
No private courier would ever be saddled with a requirement like that. It's clear that this requirement was put into place by people who want to make the USPS look bad so it's an easier argument to kill it.
Btw, I don't support privatised education either, and the evidence on various programs where it has been tried (charter schools in the US, academies in the UK, etc.) are fairly mixed. Are they better than the status quo though? Yes. No question. Not even close (the implication often is that teachers are able to just do great work without being incentivized...this doesn't reflect reality).
Also, I live somewhere that had a monopolised last-mile provider. Since privatisation, there has been real improvement in service quality and...amazingly...actual innovation. Is the service good? No. It is still more expensive (somehow) than providers with 1/10th of the infrastructure/network. And the "innovation" is largely copying those other providers. But it is actually getting better (and yes, the main issue is a unionised workforce are holding the company to ransom whilst their market share falls through the floor).
The socioeconomic situation in the U.S. is so poor that some of the top things public schools offer their attendees is food, water, shelter, and socialization. The people benefiting from these aspects have 0% of attending private schools. The fact that public schools are struggling with their educational duties is a political one and not one inherent to the service being public.
They would have a >>0% chance of attending private schools if they were each given their share of the public school budget.
I am not convinced that would be a good thing — my big concern is that a lot of 'private schools' would pop up which would just hoover up the vouchers, much as one sees with for-profit higher education.
The socioeconomic situation in the US isn't poor. It is tragic that someone thinks this but I would suggest leaving the US for a few days. Suggesting that schools are there to prevent some kind of public health catastrophe is ludicrous. The irony of incredible fortune is being unable to understand that you are fortunate.
True, and yet as someone who is extremely liberal on social issues and cannot possibly find a home on the right, I still feel uncomfortable among many on the left who don't worry as I do about the potential for stagnation in the absence of competition. It's different than it was back in the 80s but there is still a divide.
I agree with most of what you say about competition and I wanted to upvote, but this dig at unionized teachers really makes me angry.
Many, many teachers are extremely highly motivated because they love the students they see every day and cannot stand to do any less than their best for them.
Theres a middle ground here, ya know? At the end of the day we need companies that turn a net-profit by offering goods and services that ultimately lead to the tax revenue to fund those libraries, post offices and schools.
> So what if it's harmful to competition?
Again, it's a ideological positon. In the mind of people like the Koch brothers, it might be post offices and libraries today, but it might be [insert industry here] tomorrow. And that industry might be your industry. I don't share that view, but i see where they are coming from.
I have used the postal service in some fairly uncommon ways, and I have never had a package go missing or not meet their SLA for Priority Mail.
You can send a package to pretty much any town in the country for <$20 and expect it to be there in 3 or 4 days. It’s the next best thing to teleportation, unless you wanted to get it on a Sunday.
They've lost plenty of other things besides. I once sent $100 cash in a fun colored envelope containing a birthday card. The card arrived scotch-taped closed with the money gone. I know it wasn't an accident where it got ripped open by a conveyor belt or something because they re-seal torn envelopes in a plastic bag when that happens. That was more an annoying than headache inducing, but UPS has never caused problems for me like those and I use them by an order of magnitude more than USPS.
The worst part isn't that those things happen. Theft and accidents can happen anywhere. The worst part is that the USPS takes no responsibility and could not care any less. So what if a postal employee stole money from a birthday card? Sucks to be me. I can't send letters any other way. The USPS has a legally protected monopoly on letter delivery. So what if the hold time is 9 hours? Who else am I going to go to? The post office is built on bureaucracy and you and I pay the price for it.
Source: FedEx does this to us all the damned time. UPS generally delivers to our door in a brown truck. I don’t know about DHL.
Let’s not pretend that other couriers offer the same service as the USPS (specifically universal service) in a competitive market while also turning a profit.
This doesn't work out though in rural areas where it's unprofitable for a business to open a branch or provide service. This would be the case for postal service in large parts of the country just like it's the case for Internet providers.
My dad lives part-time in an unincorporated village in Alaska which has a population of 13 as of the 2010 census. Once a week, the USPS essentially charters an airplane to deliver mail there, for which senders pay the same rate they would to send mail anywhere else. The postage obviously doesn't come anywhere near covering the cost of delivery. Without this subsidized mail delivery, which is often used for groceries and other supplies, the full-time population would likely drop to zero. While it's likely that at some point in the future, if that kind of mail service continues to exist, drones will make it more efficient, it will always be much less efficient than delivering mail to people who live in cities.
It's reasonable to ask whether it's desirable to continue to subsidize people choosing such a lifestyle, and there's a good argument to be made that it is not. Many of the people who live in remote parts of Alaska have a rugged individualist mentality and a dislike for the idea of subsidies, but tend to get quiet when theirs are mentioned.
To be blunt, that's often true of rural culture in general these days.
The simple fact is that providing services to such communities is incredibly inefficient due to a lack of economies of scale. Without government subsidies, they would simply be unable to get services without paying exorbitant rates. That's not the market being immoral or whatever, it's literally just that the cost of providing the service is so high (same reason such communities often have fewer local government services as well).
They don't want to come to grips with the hypocrisy of claiming independence while actually actively choosing a highly subsidized lifestyle, and most other people are unwilling to call out the behavior because it's seen as bullying in some fashion.
Anyway, let's look at ways to make USPS more efficient. The pandemic has caused a 30% decrease in shipment volumes. If USPS wants to stay solvent they can furlough employees, lay off employees, and/or increase prices. Postal workers are unionized, so there's little chance of reducing employee expenses. That means they have to raise prices and/or ask for money from the government (which comes from taxes). Trump wants them to increase prices before he'll give them more money. This is because right now, Amazon (along with many other businesses) is shipping tons of packages via USPS. USPS loses money on each package they ship, so this is effectively a transfer from taxpayers to Amazon. Here's Trump quoted by Politico:[1]
> “The post office, if they raised the price of a package by approximately four times, it would be a whole new ballgame,” the president said during the signing ceremony for the latest coronavirus relief package. “But they don’t want to raise it because they don’t want to insult Amazon, and they don’t want to insult other companies, perhaps, that they like. The post office should raise the price of the packages to the companies. Not to the people, to the companies. If they did that, it would be a whole different story.”
Now let's look at the PDF. It mentions that Koch has funded a libertarian advocacy group called Americans for Prosperity. This group has come out against H.R. 6800, which authorizes $3 trillion of spending.[2] Of that, $25 billion goes to USPS.[3] That's less than 1% of the spending in that bill! Perhaps Americans for Prosperity aren't trying to kill the post office. Perhaps they simply don't want the government's budget to grow by another 15% of GDP, especially since much of that is likely directed towards special interests.
The bill also gives another $200 million to pay for salaries of workers in the federal prisons and it gives $187.5 billion to metropolitan areas (this money can't be spent outside of metro areas). Scanning through, I also see some stuff about discouraging the importation of drugs & medical equipment. It's a total mess.[4]
What I think is actually happening is that some people want to get another $3T of spending passed (mostly to enrich their constituents & ensure their re-election). To do this, they're using public support for the postal service (and public disdain for the Kochs) to try and sway voters. It's a sleazy tactic but it often works (as evidenced by how many upvotes this post has).
1. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-us-postal-ser...
2. https://americansforprosperity.org/afp-issues-key-vote-alert...
3. https://www.linns.com/news/us-stamps-postal-history/heroes-a...
4. The full text of the bill can be read at https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6800...
I assume they feel the same way about libraries and every other government service, but not sure if they've made any headway there.
It isn't- for most, it is about preventing the waste that tends to happen when organizations (be they corporations or government bureaucracies) become complacent and uncompetitive.
Whether corporate raiders or rubber rooms for bad union members, any system can get taken advantage of. That doesn't mean that you should assume the worst from the people you disagree with.
You have a much different experience with companies than I do then. I have been hung up on by UPS customer service. I have had to simply stop ordering from Amazon because they were delivering greater than 50% of books damaged, forcing me to waste time and money returning them despite numerous reports and complaints. There was nothing I could do and not a single person cared. It's because these companies don't care about providing a service. They care about making money. And my problems as a customer weren't enough for them to lose money on, so they weren't problems to them.
Does the USPS have problems? Yes. But at least in those cases I can actually find an actual person, usually local, to speak to. But that isn't the point. You're arguing that somehow companies aren't complacent when that is my exact opposite experience, especially with delivery companies.
> That doesn't mean that you should assume the worst from the people you disagree with.
Where did I do that? Especially in the case of USPS, the Koch's complaining about so-called unfair competition is exactly caring about companies more than people.
fuck the post office.
Often the cost of metering can drastically outweigh the economic value of a simple, easy to understand/predict shipping service. This is why flat rate packaging is so popular across FedEx, UPS and USPS.
There is hefty price discrimination against high cost to serve customers baked into UPS and FedEx's model, and smaller couriers like DHL and Amazon Shipping happily blacklist large parts of the USA due to price.
you should educate yourself on the point before arguing such a strong strawman. this battle has been going on for over 150 years, and it has nothing to do with parcel service. start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company
that's what i and the whole country is 'on about.' welcome to the conversation.
we go to dinner. you get a side salad, and i get a steak and some wine. we split the bill down the middle. cool? i'm not trying to diss you. i want to be friends with you.
these sort of imbalances generally disappear in aggregate (sometimes your letter goes to a farm) and/or are worth the simplicity anyway, should you ever choose to take part.
it's not 'worth the simplicity' to me, living in a high rent city. literally every piece of mail in an urban area is 10x it's actual delivery cost, which pays for the farmer's mail, and him getting all the spam, which actually costs 10x more than he pays. exponentially more people live in cities. every time you get your bank statement delivered in a city, you and 20 others just paid for a single letter to be delivered to a farmer. through shittier interest rates in your savings account. yes, i rarely mail letters. like 10 times a year. and same goes for the 3 million other people in my city. and yet because of low farmland population, urbanites still mail many more total letters vs farmers.
we're not paying for it? whi, pray tell, do you think is paying for that farmer to send a letter? he pays half a dollar for a stamp. the post office spends about $10 to deliver it. my letter costs a penny to deliver. i pay half a dollar too.
so no, it is not 'worth the simplicity' to me, to pay for that farmer. but federal law forces me to.
soo how that works?
locations have different expenses. farms have cheap land. they have expensive delivery cost. taking money from people paying high rent to subsidize farmers is not 'benefitial' to people living in cities. it's benefitial to farmers. how about everyone pay their own expenses, and we don't shuffle around other people's costs. it's not benefitial to me to pay for a farmer getting fifty junk mail catalogs a week.
All first-class letters of 1 oz or less are identical. Housing is not identical, which is why it’s fine to have varying prices for housing. Many places have rent controls in place. The utility of having flat rate letter postage for every citizen outweighs any benefit realized from privatization.
> taking money from people paying high rent to subsidize farmers is not 'benefitial' to people living in cities.
This has been done for quite a while in the US, as crop subsidy payments. People in cities benefit by having stable food prices.
> it's not benefitial to me to pay for a farmer getting fifty junk mail catalogs a week.
You’re not paying for it, hope that helps.
so you looked it up, saw you were wrong, and changed your argument to 'parcel service' = 'letter service.'
you were given examples of why people want letter service from private companies, and how urban citizens pay for rural letter costs.
your argument at that point us 'you don't pay for it, the money to cover costs comes from a magic place, but if you do, quickthrowman has determined it's worth it, so case closed.'
thank you for the entertainment.
So food is really important and vital. Should the government be in charge of growing and distributing food?
Of course not. This experiment has been tried with horribly deadly results. The basic fact of the matter is that the market is far more effective at fairly distributing goods and services. If you look at the major sources of inequalities today in our society, they are in education, policing, and the justice system, all of which are under public control. Interestingly enough, the tort system, which is partly under private control, is far more fair than the criminal justice system that is under public control, which is why killer cops never go to prison but their victims get million dollar damage payments. (as the old axiom goes, if the king controls criminal punishment, the kings friends get away with murder).
The point is, it's a total non-sequitur to assume that just because a decentralized system is the primary means of distributing something therefore implies that it only exists to make corporate profits at the expense of us poor people. Individuals like myself who are for wider privatization believe so because we care about people. I think people will be better off if the government isn't in charge of growing food, and I think people would be better off if more systems were privatized. It's not because I have a fetish for companies, it's because I think the general welfare would improve.
If you want to mentions specific countries we can compare them to the US.
> Of course not. This experiment has been tried with horribly deadly results.
I assume you're referencing famines in communist countries, etc. In those instances, the government had a monopoly on food growth and distribution.
Your example is irrelevant because the USPS is just one of numerous mail carriers (UPS, FedEx, etc).
Yes, the civil justice system is more private-party focused, but you have conveniently left out why victims obtain judgements in civil courts when cops are not convicted in criminal courts. In civil litigation, a judgement is made based on the preponderance of evidence. In the criminal courts, the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt". It's easier for the plaintiff to win in civil court than for the prosecutor to win in criminal court.
Private/public control is inconsequential when compared to the level of proof required for conviction/judgement.
The primary issue is qualified immunity, coupled with the DA needing to rely on cops to do their jobs, leading to a massive conflict of interest. Unless the exact circumstances in one case occurred previously (and it was explicitly ruled illegal), a cop is let off due to the way qualified immunity works.
If a cop faced the same criminal trial as a regular citizen, they would very likely go to jail as most cases that go to trial result in a conviction.
However, it should be noted that some people, possibly even MANY people...do not have money or have limited money that must be allocated to stop death in one form or another. The market does not have a solution for them because they are not participants in the market. Yet they exist as a rather defined part of objective reality.
Privatization is charming and all, but it is not an end all, be all to the ills of mankind.
It already is. The Food and Drug Administration exists. There are countless laws that dictate everything from how crops are. grown to how animals are treated to how products are labeled. Moreover, the government purchases enormous quantities of food and distributes it for the military as well as being involved in everything from food stamps to the famed "welfare cheese" strategic food reserve issues.
Now, it's true that the government isn't in control of literally every aspect of food distribution, but they definitely do things to ensure a stable food supply for the country at reasonable prices. (And then there are the billions and billions in farmer subsidies etc.)
And I'm honestly not sure where all the USPS hate comes from: I think they actually provide pretty damn great service[0], at a pretty damn great price. Their financial struggles are mainly due to Congress heaping unreasonable financial obligations on them (obligations that companies like FedEx or UPS would never have). I don't think I could say they're objectively superior to the private couriers, but they're not objectively inferior either.
You mention education, and the issues there mainly boil down to lack of funding. The US spends a pittance per student compared to countries with much better public education. You could say ok, well, that's just proof that the government can't manage education well. And I guess that's maybe not false, but consider that a big reason why education isn't funded properly in the US is because of people (like Betsey DeVos) who want to kill public education, not because they truly believe the private sector can do it better, but because doing so will enrich their cronies. Regardless, you could flip it around and say that the US's public education is amazing considering how under attack its very existence is.
> the tort system, which is partly under private control
Not sure I understand what you mean. In a civil trial, you still have the same lawyers represent you, and you get the same public-servant judges, etc. The state's word is final when a judgment is rendered.
And in fact we do know what happens in civil matters when we try to privatize it: arbitration (often binding, because god forbid we disallow that), which is hardly a paragon of fairness or equality.
> ... is far more fair than the criminal justice system that is under public control
I don't think this is an argument about public vs. private, though. Yes, in a criminal trial, the prosecution has many, many tools available to them that a plaintiff in a civil trial wouldn't have, in the form of whatever law enforcement apparatus is at hand to help gather evidence and find witness testimony (and perhaps other nefarious things that they're in a unique position to get away with). But there's really no other option; you just can't treat criminal cases in the same way you treat civil cases.
There's a ton of inequality in our judicial system, but that has nothing to do with the public-sector private-sector dichotomy. In a civil matter, the state is a mostly-disinterested party, while in a criminal matter, the state has an inherent interest.
> which is why killer cops never go to prison but their victims get million dollar damage payments
No, that's because criminal proceedings have a much higher evidentiary standard. Which is how it should be, because the result of a criminal proceeding can deprive someone of their freedom or life.
[0] Two nice things the USPS does that the private couriers don't: pick up mail and packages from my building for free, and keep a key to my condo building so I don't have to be available to let them in.
I don't hate the USPS. I think it's mistake.
>You mention education, and the issues there mainly boil down to lack of funding.
Please spare me. The US spends an average of $15,400 per year per kid, which is an enormous cost. In NYC, it's even higher than this, yet their test scores and grades are worse than say Utah where the the cost is $5k per year per kid. Funding has, past an extremely basic level, no bearing on child academic performance whatsoever.
>Not sure I understand what you mean. In a civil trial, you still have the same lawyers represent you, and you get the same public-servant judges, etc. The state's word is final when a judgment is rendered.
In a criminal trial, only one party can file charges to begin with. The state. In a civil trial, anyone can file charges. Even after trial the inequality persists, which is why Roger Stone won't have to serve his full prison sentence. In a civil trial, the president/governor/mayor cannot pardon because he is not a party to the trial.
>In a civil matter, the state is a mostly-disinterested party
It is not a party, full stop. This is the advantage to the tort system.
>No, that's because criminal proceedings have a much higher evidentiary standard.
It's because the state simply chooses not to charge. Which is why the Director of National Intelligence did not get tried for committing perjury, and why Donald Trump hasn't been indicted with treason, and why it took Minneapolis to burn before Chauvin got charged with anything. The state has total control over criminal proceedings which is an enormous source of inequality.
Especially when you're being entirely disingenuous about your argument. I don't honestly understand how you can truly believe that corporate interests care more about people than the government. Perhaps you also believe that corporations are people, and at that point I guess I'd have to concede. If corporations are people, then they do care about people. It's just the one they care about is themselves.
Not every business is a cartoon mustache twirling villain but it's baffling to me to see the lengths people will go to to both outright dismiss the governments ability to do literally anything, and also that private enterprise can do it better.
Also the major sources of inequalities today go far beyond education, policing, and the justice system. Many of them are inexplicably tied to private enterprise. You don't want the government in charge of growing or distributing food. Well that's great. What's also great is that the cheapest food you can buy is also some of the most unhealthy trash you can put in your body. Soda is cheaper than water.
These services were designed to help make things affordable to people who could not afford the private version.
Maybe instead we should have just made sure everybody could afford the private version, by directly giving them money!
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/is-sweden-proof-that-...
> In contrast to American private schools, Sweden’s free schools don’t charge tuition — they draw on government funds to operate — and are required to follow Sweden’s national curriculum. They’re more comparable to American charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
This system is also unique in the world and the results since its institution have been woeful. Massive increase in segregation, inflation in grades, bankruptcies where the pupils suddenly doesn't have a school. All because they need to market themselves as "good schools" to make the largest amount of profit.
For the same reasons they tend to establish themselves in places with socioeconomically strong families, since those kids needs less work, and are thus more profitable.
There's also a queue system in-place where the parents must enqueue their child into these "good" schools basically directly after birth. These kind of hidden signals is used to further stratify the pupils through both segregation and class. A government issued report suggested that there should be a draw instead of a queue to prevent these outcomes. This is of course vehemently opposed by the "free-school industry" (yes, ofc they added the "free" prefix).
This system is not something that any country should adopt, and luckily, we're so far unique about it (heard something about Chile (Chicago Boys remember?) but not sure that's still the case). There's a large majority to change this system, but unfortunately the current situation in parliament doesn't allow it.
> OECD’s reports show that, of the 53 participants, 25 countries’ governments (nine of which have top 20 PISA scores overall) provide vouchers and/or tuition tax credits for students to attend private schools (see accompanied table).
Is it really that hard to think of what you could do with a coporate money and know government intervention?
Here's just one: run at a loss until your competition is driven out of business. Then raise prices once you're a monopoly again. (This isn't a hypothetical either, but a standard practice.)
Unless they find another billionaire with pockets as deep as yours, and a willingness to wage a price war for years.
But once an idea is validated smaller competitors come in and start picking off verticals. Shopify and it’s 100,000+ stores are around in large part due to Amazon not only validating and producing best practices for the e-commerce model but also in building the foundational infrastructure (AWS) for smaller companies to leverage.
There are major benefits to having mega companies and billionaires around, and particularly having them in your country. Albeit, I agree, we do need to come up with a better tax strategy for the ultra wealthy.
Sorry, you mean that billionaires and megacorps are able to profit off of ideas pioneered and validated by publically-funded research institutes? I don't see how their inability to do so would be a loss to society.
And we can’t consider an idea validated until it is brought to market.
I see you've designed your test to guarantee the result you want.
A billion dollar market is not the same a billionaire . You need the former you don’t need the later .
If you make money this way, untapped resources don't necessarily look like untapped oil fields, instead they might look like entire industries that (with friendly legislators) can suddenly be opened up private profit (especially yours), or industries that can be captured into monopolies, or nations whose current economic situation can be exploited in ways that put large amounts of money into your pocket.
Regardless of which entity delivers a package the quality of the result can generally be objectively judged (cost, duration, package care, etc). Depending on the entity delivering search results of e.g the term “bear” the quality is highly subjective (e.g black bear wiki, Chicago bears, polar bear wiki, bear Halloween Costume amazon page, Berenstain Bears, etc). Not to mention the results are continuously changing.
I’m not really familiar with labor theory but I’m inclined to think your analogy isn’t applicable to the discussion of privatizing USPS.
Could you rephrase your comment in terms of sorting algorithms? Say a bubble sort would be rewarded more than a merge sort? Maybe that would better articulate your point??
Google created a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to its door.
is it really capturing value or is it creating value? people made links because they wanted to make links anyway. the value of links to a search engine doesn't exist without a search engine, and the existing value of links isn't diminished by that (except for the specific case of a manually curated link directory, e.g. the original yahoo).
They were not alone in this, but it’s hard to compare their impact on the web to say, various forms of cataloging of works in library networks, and come away seeing them as impartially additive.
I used the example of the library cataloging because I think it’s an apt parallel. These systems, invented by librarians for organizing all of the world’s information, prior to the internet, have contributed immense social utility and enabled work that would be otherwise be unimaginable and impossible. But no librarian would claim that Melvil Dewey’s accomplishment was greater than that of all the works that have been catalogued. Page rank itself was derived from measures of academic citation impact scoring by Eugene Garfield, who I likewise imagine would’ve felt the same, despite being a successful entrepreneur on similar terms.
The sort of hubris behind thinking that abstractions of a network are more valuable than the network and its labor itself perhaps explains why libraries remain an incredible resource and Google search gets worse and worse, year after year.
Nobody is claiming that these people did something completely on their own, or did not draw upon immense wealth created and produced by others. The point is that each individual person's marginal contribution to the global utility function is not equal. Einstein built upon the work of others but the edifice he created is worth more than the one I have created. He increased the social utility function more than me, so we can say that his work is more valuable than mine. This is completely orthogonal to whether or not he had help.
Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men.
Are you rejecting the concept of variation in aggregate utility? I don't think that you need any sort of capitalist epistemology, or hierarchical vision of society to explain the presence of utility variance.
> Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men.
Identifying individual variations in utility is how you maximize network growth. That is precisely the reason capitalism is structured the way that it is. Direct resources to people and entities who are growing the network, in proportion to how much they are growing it. That is the distilled essence of capitalism.
No, of course there is variance in aggregate utility. It’s what weight that variance is given relative to support of the entire network that determines its ability to produce and further, useful knowledge. Overemphasis on individual contributions and direction of resources to them and away from the overall health of the network results in various forms of gaming and pseudo-novelty. Citation rings and replication crises are obvious examples of this.
>Identifying individual variations in utility is how you maximize network growth. That is precisely the reason capitalism is structured the way that it is. Direct resources to people and entities who are growing the network, in proportion to how much they are growing it. That is the distilled essence of capitalism.
The distilled essence of Capitalism is that people who own Capital accrue more by using it to buy the labor of others, who must concede to this arrangement as a condition of their survival. I expect on this point we’d irreconcilably disagree, so it’s probably best to leave it aside.
Resources in Capitalism, however, are not directed toward people who are growing the network in socially useful or ways that sustain its overall health (including maintaining its diversity), but toward individual nodes or small clusters that pursue their own short term growth for growth’s sake at the expense of the network’s overall health. The externalities of pursuing such growth and the periodic crises it produces are almost never taken into account.
Google is a good example of this because again, they observed a useful signal within a knowledge network and added extra utility in making it available to be easily leveraged by others. But from there, the prioritizing of their own growth deteriorated the network’s overall health, as observed in things like the explosion in various forms of SEO optimization and content mills, surveillance advertising and its malware, foreclosing of the web in services like AMP, and use of its market position to bully competitors and quash innovation independent of them.
It seems like your point here is mostly just that capitalism, as currently constructed, is imperfect at directing resources towards productive activities, and I would agree with that. But I think it's extremely hard to argue with how successful capitalism has been at creating network growth. Global utility as measured (imperfectly) by GDP has grown tremendously since the introduction of market capitalism.
I suppose you could argue that capitalism achieved this 'by accident', but i'm not sure whether that matters. The fact is that capitalism has caused huge swathes of the world to be substantially better off than they were before, and promises to do the same for more as time moves forward. Other economic systems have failed to achieve similar kinds of growth, and absent that growth, they simply don't have the ability to raise people out of poverty, no matter how nice their intentions.
> Google is a good example of this because again, they observed a useful signal within a knowledge network and added extra utility in making it available to be easily leveraged by others. But from there, the prioritizing of their own growth deteriorated the network’s overall health, as observed in things like the explosion in various forms of SEO optimization and content mills, surveillance advertising and its malware, foreclosing of the web in services like AMP, and use of its market position to bully competitors and quash innovation independent of them.
Yes, Google has created various forms of waste. But you can't look at a single externality and indict a system with it in isolation. You need to look at the net change in utility. I think it's very hard to argue that Google's net impact on the world was not positive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theor...
Not sure if a charitable interpretation is warranted but I can imagine good intentions leading to the same actions.
But have you considered that they _genuinely_ belive that minimal government and more privatization leads to overall better results? It might just be that they have good intensions, that they really wish for a better outcome for all.
I don't share that view, but i do think that there is a fraction of hardcore liberterians that truly believe we'd be better of without many of the government-founded services such as libraries, schools etc. - and while i do not agree with that, those people are still entitled to their opinion and are allowed to lobby for it.
Yes, and that makes it even worse. They’re so out of touch with common people and so insulated from routine everyday life, their opinion shouldn’t count for anything.
I don’t care if joe programmer on HN or Jeff the General Contractor at the bar are advocating for dismantling the post office because of libertarian ideology, because they have neither the power nor resources to affect change.
I do care when insanely wealthy billionaires who are completely insulated from the rest of society argue for horseshit like this because they have power to change it, and it’s for ideological reasons.
It’s pure narcissism to argue for a position that would negatively affect millions of people when the one arguing for change wouldn’t suffer one damn bit and in effect disregard everyone else’s suffering for their ideological bullshit position.
The existence of billionaires combined with Citizens United is an actual problem, the post office is not.
Allowing individuals to accumulate so much wealth is just not good for the common people, and the fact that our government is so inept at managing money isn't a good enough reason to allow individuals to reach such power and wealth. If they are allowed to accumulate such wealth, there should be much stronger laws preventing their influence in government policies.
The USPS is damn good at delivering the mail, I don’t trust any private company to treat a first-class letter with the care the USPS generally does.
The Post Office actually makes money, but they’re legally required to fund a new hire’s entire projected pension at the time of hiring which lets Republicans point at how the post office loses money when it was done that way on purpose.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
>"FACT: ALL companies are required to fund any pension promises they make to their employees. (The only exceptions are for top executives, who can lose their pensions if a company goes bankrupt, and for entities that aren’t actually “companies” - state and local governments and churches.) NONE of them are permitted to take a “pay as you go” approach but must contribute to a pension fund an amount equivalent to what a worker has accrued that year in benefit promises, regardless of how far into the future that worker will be retiring, and must make up for any shortfalls due to asset losses or other reasons. The USPS and private sector companies use the same general actuarial principles to do so, though there are differences in assumptions, particulars of the calculations, etc."
Companies need to fund their pension plans, but only for the portion of time the worker has been employed by them. For example, for FY 2020, the company needs to set aside money corresponding to an additional year of work. But for the USPS, the law requires it to set aside money assuming that the worker will work his entire career for USPS, and project all retirement costs 75 years into the future, even for workers that they haven't even hired yet. In actuary, this is the difference between "actual vested liability", and "total projected liability". The result is clearly absurd. Moreover, this money is not staying in USPS retirement accounts, is going to the government. So it doesn't even guarantee that the money will be there for USPS workers. To add to the injury, USPS is allowed only to invest on treasury bonds, which means that they need to raise even more money than a private company, which is free to invest in any high grade bond.
https://www.businessinsider.com/usps-rise-fall-post-office-c...
The USPS is required to pre-pay the pension costs they have incurred. It's not pre-paying the retirement fund for 75 years. It's putting money aside so that you have the money to pay your 25 year old worker the money you promised them when they're 100.
"[the law] required the post office to calculate all of its retiree pension and healthcare costs for the next 75 years, including for people it hadn't even hired yet, and put away enough over the next 10 years to cover them. To put this in perspective, that'd be like you only working from age 18 to 28 and then expecting to live on that income until you were 103 years old."
>“[T]he PAEA required the Postal Service to calculate all of its likely pension costs over the next 75 years, and then sock away enough money between 2007 and 2016 to cover most of them.” The Week, April 16, 2018.
>FACT: the actuarial valuation methods used by the USPS are based only on accruals attributed to past service, no different than any other such valuation.
>The Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund (PSRHBF) is a USPS-specific fund, and its 10-K report specifies that it uses the “aggregate entry age normal acturarial cost method.” For pension benefits, employees participate in the CSRS and FERS general civil servant pensions, using the same method. In this method, yes, the actuary calculates the value of all benefits to be paid out in the future, due to past and future service, and then subtracts out the value of the future accruals, to calculate the actuarial liability. In addition, the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund calculates a projection of liabilities 75 years into the future in its annual report, but this does not mean that 75 years’ worth of future accruals are advance-funded, only that the long-term sustainability of the system is measured over a 75-year period.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
> In this method, yes, the actuary calculates the value of all benefits to be paid out in the future, due to past and future service, and then subtracts out the value of the future accruals, to calculate the actuarial liability.
I.e., the USPS has to raise the money to fund liabilities for 75 years, and it had to do so in 10 years, which essentially meant that they had to operate in the red making its financial situation even more complicated.
Your cite says they had to put aside money for all their pension costs over the next 75 years. Including people they haven't even hired yet.
My cite says that they had to calculate pension costs payable over the next 75 years that they already incurred. That's a much smaller number and matches the requirements for private companies.
You can find the explanation in several articles, for example:
"[the law] requires the self-supporting U.S. Postal Service, which receives not one dime in taxpayer subsidies, to fully fund its retirees’ health benefits for 75 years into the future. It also requires that money be set aside over a 10-year period, at a rate of more than $5 billion per year.
That means the postal service is now paying for the future health care of retirees it has not yet hired, and who in some cases have not yet been born. No other public or private company in the nation bears any kind of financial burden like that.
Even worse, none of that money is truly being set aside. Instead, it is going directly into the U.S. government’s general fund, and it’s being spent on current government operations. The set-aside is a theoretical accounting gimmick. Those future retirement liabilities are actually being added to the national debt."
https://roanoke.com/news/local/casey-the-most-insane-law-by-...
Because pensions go up with years of service you have to account for the worker continuing to work when calculating pension liability. As an example, say a pension vests after 5 years. What should the pension cost be for an employee in year 2? The best answer is something like 1/5 of the NPV of their pension.
That's what they mean by "benefits to be paid out... due to .. future service".
>That means the postal service is now paying for the future health care of retirees it has not yet hired,
Did you not see the part of my cite where that is specifically called a myth?
?
Did you not read my post where it said:
> The best answer is something like 1/5 of the NPV of their pension.
Of course nobody is required to pay the entire NPV of the pension today. For an employee that is retiring in 30 years they are required to pay 1/30th of the NPV of their pension each year. That's what the USPS is required to do. They're not being required to pay the entire cost of their employee pensions up front.
1: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/... (page 26)
That hasn’t been my experience in the least. Terrible customer service, packages lost, packages requiring signatures left on door step.
And the best is when my package says “delivered” yet shows up 3 days later.
Are you kidding? They're all the markets nobody talks about because they're working.
Go to the store and buy a chair. There are a hundred different kinds. Any kind you like. The barrier to entry is low. There are many competitors.
> The Post Office actually makes money
The problem with the Post Office isn't that they don't make money (though having to be bailed out by the taxpayer is unacceptable for any reason, and the pension thing was at the behest of the USPS union rather than the Republicans). The problem with it is that they have a monopoly on carrying mail which prevents customers from enjoying the benefits of competition.
I was operating under the assumption that a market that has tariffs on foreign goods [0] is not ‘truly free’ but perhaps you disagree.
[0] https://myhfa.org/tariff-relief-doesnt-apply-to-furniture-fr...
> USPS problem is a lack of competition
Do you expect a private company to service every single rural address that currently receives mail for the same or lower price? We can’t even get ISPs to wire the entire country.
But now you're just being pedantic. You could make the same argument about taxes, where some states have higher property taxes so factories there have a competitive disadvantage and so on. But then you can't even make the same claim of black markets because their illegality increases costs.
In practice what matters is not whether there is some kind of ideologically pure anarchist vision of freedom which requires no government to exist anywhere in the world, but rather whether there exists competition sufficient to keep margins thin and make companies responsive to customer demands. Which there is, for things like chairs. Some might even say for things like package delivery.
> Do you expect a private company to service every single rural address that currently receives mail for the same or lower price?
They would surely provide service to every address at a price which pays their costs and a market rate of return. Whether that's lower than the existing price in every single case whatsoever doesn't seem like a very strong argument to hinge the entire existence of the USPS on. Especially when there isn't any obvious reason why that subsidy should be a moral imperative, or if it somehow was why it couldn't be satisfied with an explicit subsidy rather than operating an entire national business as a monopoly just to create an implicit one.
> We can’t even get ISPs to wire the entire country.
The incumbents that have captured the regulators? Of course not. And they've had regulations put into place to keep anyone else from doing it either.
Meanwhile, Starlink.
I don't quite understand why that's something we need to do. Those that live in rural addresses that can't be efficiently delivered to can pick up their mail in town. Sure, it's less convenient but lack of conveniences is part of living in the country.
I’ll take the bait and offer you my position on green energy. My employer performs alternative energy work, so that part would make me feel good, but I don’t have a strong left position on energy. I’m fine with nuclear, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro for generating electricity. I believe reducing the amount of coal we use is generally a good thing. That about sums it up.
Just to be clear, we don't have any problem with schools or libraries. We just think the model of having governments collect taxes and then pay for those things is broken. In consequentialist terms, it's broken because it removes competition from the equation, and competition generally leads to progressively improving products and services, and/or lower cost goods and services. In deontological terms, it's broken because taxation is theft.
And that notion is what many of us reject.
To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state
Not exactly, although plenty of Libertarians do reject the legitimacy of the State out of hand. I find the issue to be more nuanced than that. If you hold, as Bastiat did, that "the law" (aka "the State") can be something like - but no more than - the "collective extension to our individual right to self defense" and that no mere aggregation of individuals can have a right to do anything that a single individual doesn't have a right to do, then you can conceptualize a State that does things like, say, protecting private property, but which can't lawfully require payment of taxes.
All of that said, I didn't come here to write pages and pages on political theory. There are entire books that treat this entire topic much better than I could. I'd refer anybody who is interested in this to The Law [2]by Bastiat, as well as the works of Lysander Spooner[2] among others.
You can only do that for the specific case if you believe that either (1) the specific concrete details of property rights are matters of self-evident and immutable natural law, not contextual judgements that involve a balancing of interests, or (2) each individual is empowered to define and impose their version of property rights on others. Otherwise, a state with no power that isn't exactly that held by individuals comprising the state cannot define property laws, much less enforce them. (Technically, it can't define property laws in the first case, either, but it can recognize the concrete and specific elements of, and enforce, the laws that were carved on stone tablets by the invisible hand.)
Also, Lysander Spooner literally is against private property. He was part of the Socialist Internationale. The validity of his rejection of the state on basis of unjustified hierarchy also led to his rejection of capitalism on grounds of unjustified hierarchy. Instead, he was a mutualist. You know, the political economy for which one of it's foundational texts is What is property, which coined the slogan : "La propriété, c'est le vol", by Proudhon.
Bastiat attempted to use this essentially anarchist analysis of the state, but exempt private property from it by inventing some weird standard of government action that has no deeper justification and is pretty much axiomatic.
This is a huge simplification, but if you want more detail you can read "Why Anarcho-capitalism is not Anarchism" either on the Anarchist Library or, if you use Debian, via apt-get install anarchism.
As for Spooner: I am not saying I agree with his analysis on everything (same for Bastiat as far as that goes). I'm just pointing out that those two represent some useful sources of thought on the illegitimacy of the State. That was intended mainly for people who weren't already involved in studying this particular issue.
The question of "what is property" is an interesting and fundamental one for sure. I'm still chewing on that, honestly. Some days I think I know, other days I'm convinced I was wrong before. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you have to axiomatically state that private property is good and government is bad, then I don't really see why anyone would have to follow your arguments, because not only are such axioms ridiculous, as seen by the attempt to create a rationalization for it. If the argument according to which the state is illegitimate has as a consequence that so is private property, but you still axiomatically state that private property is legitimate, you've also invalidated the original argument that the state is illegitimate, and now your entire worldview is based on two absurd axioms, and not any logic.
A moral philosophy or political economy is only ever valid and worthwhile if it is based on axioms/values that the rest of society share. For example - negative freedom is good, positive freedom is good, prosperity is good, and so on, which you'll find that people tend to agree with inherently. I don't think that there's anyone for which "private property is good" and "the state is bad" is an axiom.
So while in theory I agree with your premise that they are allowed to lobby for whatever they want, the reality is that their influence on society is way overboard and should be limited (limited political contributions!).
Generally it seems like they think that minimal government leads to better results in a social Darwinism or "get rid of the parasites" sense.
I've also never really seen them seriously recon with the question of what you do with people who cannot compete, and at some point I feel like that crosses the line into intellectual negligence.
Again, I don't want to try to demonize the other side and I really wish I could think of a good example, but I really cannot.
It absolutely is intellectual negligence, and there's nothing wrong with pointing it out. The standard answer trotted out is "charity" which is disingenuous at best, and completely impractical at worst.
There's nothing wrong with pointing out the logical flaws of people who secretly wish they were feudal lords or a pater familias in Ancient Rome, and wildly overestimate what their position or level of success in a theoretical 'Libertarian Society' would be.
Why would I care about Koch's views towards government?
Would I ask Harvey Weinstein about sexual assault and harassment?
Would I ask a creationist about evolution?
Would I ask a pro-lifer about women's reproductive rights?
Would I ask an Iowan farmer about agricultural subsidies?
Would I ask Coca Cola about diabetes?
Would I ask a reality TV star about presidential powers?
Would I ask Rupert Murdock about journalism?
Would I ask The Sinclair Group about media consolidation?
Would I ask a white supremacist about race relations?
Would I ask members of John Birch Society about voting rights?
Would I ask members of The Federalist Society about balance of powers?
Because they believe it’s bad for the public welfare. As you acknowledge, they have no other reason to care.
Edit: I failed to mention that the libertarian groups, at least in the US, are also a consistent reservoir and breeding ground for reactionaries. Another plausible explanation is that a lot of (ultra-wealthy) people have even worse politics, but launder their views through "free minds, free markets."
And what is "worse politics" but a begging of the question? Ok, privatizing the Post Office is worse than keeping it public; I agree. The question is why they believe that.
It isn't; the reactionary comment is a more general one about the relationship between self-labeled libertarians and political positions that are disguisable within the libertarian framework.
Being anti-postage and anti-national ID for disenfranchisement purposes are good examples of this; reactionary groups encourage normalizing these views under the auspices of libertarianism.
"Worse politics" is in that context; wealthy people have a (correctly!) estimated interest in lots of political positions that less monied people find unpalatable (cf. voter suppression, maintaining systems of wealth and power that stem from racism). (Right-)libertarianism provides a ideological veneer for these positions.
Poor people (including, disproportionately, minorities) are more likely to depend on public services! They're also more likely to be hired by public agencies and receive good salaries and job protections[1]. They're less likely to live in areas that private companies are financially incentivized to service regularly; they're more likely to not be at home for deliveries or not have a workplace that allows them to accept deliveries. A public system doesn't plug all of these holes, but it goes a long way.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/14/the-state-o...
Purposefully making public agencies inefficient in order to ensure "good salaries and job protections" for workers is a bad idea. It's highly not-transparent, and it's impossible to figure out how much the public is paying for those "good jobs." And also, you end up getting crappy service as a result. (Public transit agencies in the US are great at providing jobs with "good salaries and job protections." They're bad at providing transit. Meanwhile, in countries like Sweden, there is a lot of privatization in the rail and transit industry. Stockholm's subway, for example, is operated by Hong Kong's subway company. Denmark has bus and train lines operated by Deutsche Bahn. Europe is far ahead of the United States now in public-sector privatization.)
The important thing is that there's hardly any of a dozen privatized large sectors that have actually improved at all, there are however multiple examples how things have become worse, with increased consumer prices and worse coverage in unprofitable areas of the country.
I have one objection to this, and one question. The objection is that, on average, the European countries listed are substantially smaller and more densely populated than the population that the USPS serves by mandate. It's not clear to me that a private company could provide uniform service without (righteously) demanding either obscene subsidies or a change to their service mandates. Neither of these outcomes are particularly desirable.
The question (or questions): given that the US already has private competitors to the USPS, what would you expect the privatization of the USPS to look like? I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but I don't think "pay a company to do it" is a canonical interpretation of the Postal Clause. In the context of private delegation, who is doing the delegation? State governments, or the federal one? Subsidies by either feel strictly less scrutable than public budgets.
> Purposefully making public agencies inefficient in order to ensure "good salaries and job protections" for workers is a bad idea.
It's also nobody's idea! The good salaries are a natural consequence of the USPS's coverage and delivery mandates, both of which are desirable (I don't want to wait an extra day for my priority mail because a private company doesn't want to pay overtime). The job protections are standard for any civil service job, and are essential for a nonpartisan and patronage-free workforce.
Furthermore, I just don't buy into the (tacit) argument that the USPS's "efficiency" should be measured with the same metrics used by a business. I expect more from the USPS than I do from a profitable and efficient business because I pay for it with my taxes, and I'd like to keep it that way.
So goes it for public transportation: I'll take my 24/7 $2.75 subway ride over the Stockholm (or Tokyo) metro's limited hours and fare zones.
Libraries are a public service. They're free. The people who use them don't have to pay anything for it, which is a boon to those who otherwise couldn't afford it. It's basically a public subsidy for access to books.
The postal service is a business. There isn't supposed to be any subsidy, you pay for it through postage, and they're not doing anything that UPS or FedEx couldn't do just as well. Public libraries don't need a law prohibiting private libraries to keep everyone from abandoning them, but the USPS needs a government monopoly on carrying letters? If the post office was so great then they shouldn't need that -- but then they'd likely fail, because private competitors would do it better and people would stop using USPS.
It's the same thing with public schools. The benefit is that the government pays for them, so no one can say they can't afford to send their kids to school. But that doesn't require the subsidy to go only to schools operated by the government. Give the parents education vouchers and let them choose their school. If the public schools are so great then they'll choose them anyway. The opposition to this comes from people knowing full well that they're not.
Or the price of delivery would be so exorbitant as to be prohibitive. UPS and FedEx only offer delivery to these locations because they see it as a required feature to remain competitive with USPS.
If it isn't profitable to offer delivery there then they would have no reason to compete for it even now, and if it is then they would do it regardless.
But more to the point, it's possible that in a competitive market there would be different optimal solutions. In a very rural area, rather than sending a mail truck on a fifty mile trek through the wilderness to deliver one parcel, everyone in the area might have a mailbox in the town center and pick up their mail whenever they go into town, because that would be cheaper by enough that people would choose it over the more inefficient/expensive alternative. You can't justify the entire USPS just to avoid that sort of increase in efficiency.
Incorrect. They are not competing for that service. Rather they extend their networks to match USPS because they wish to attain feature parity with the USPS. It would be annoying to address a package to a U.S. address, take it into FedEx and find they would not deliver it. This is the case with many smaller parcel carriers. The large national carriers wish to be competitive in cost and convenience to USPS.
You can read about USPS's universal service obligation here.
https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/usps-uso-exe...
> In a very rural area, rather than sending a mail truck on a fifty mile trek through the wilderness to deliver one parcel, everyone in the area might have a mailbox in the town center and pick up their mail whenever they go into town,
That is in fact generally how it works but even still the postage rates for rural areas are subsidized by urban areas.
But that doesn't even make sense. If it costs more to ship to a particular address, they have no reason to refuse to do it rather than simply charge an amount that causes it to still be profitable and then turn a profit in doing so.
> This is the case with many smaller parcel carriers.
Presumably because they know they don't have any operations there at all, and so the price they would have to charge wouldn't make them competitive with even FedEx and UPS. That proves nothing about whether the bigger carriers wouldn't still do it when they're positioned to offer the most competitive price.
> That is in fact generally how it works but even still the postage rates for rural areas are subsidized by urban areas.
But why is that a good thing? Cross-subsidies are inefficient. People in urban areas can be just as poor as people in rural areas, especially given the higher cost of living. And if you really want a subsidy like that then make it explicit -- and maybe pay for it on the backs of people who can afford it rather than people who can't.
Or is it more likely that the private carriers would expect and demand a rump Post Office to carry the mail they find unprofitable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause
Whether it operates like a business now, it was absolutely intended to be a function of government.
In US the rules are per state and complicated also while mostly paid poll workers are really volunteering for the job .
The second part surprises me all the time , US May have lesser polling booths if they have lesser people volunteer to be poll workers . Despite collecting so much tax and have so many government employees , Election Day in the US depends on so much on volunteers
Election Day is also not a national holiday . I am sure the country can afford a single day off every 2/4 years so people can vote . You don’t even need an extra holiday, Keep it on 4th July if you have to, what better to celebrate independence than casting your vote ?
Free and fair elections is the foundation of democracy, with all the gerrymandering , ID rules , mail-in ballot issues, voter suppression I am not sure how free and fair US elections truly are and how much of the population they truly are represented
Of course it is lack of political will to make changes that is always the problem.
In this case there is no intent as well. It is like congress voting its own salary? It took 202 years to pass the 27th Amendment after all and it has the just most basic of safeguards on compensation.
The legislation governing legislators such as election laws, salary, term limits etc should not be controlled by them, this is a major flaw in many democratic systems.
Moreover, it's a completely neutral service - a ballot from Berkley, CA is treated identically in terms of priority as one from Amarillo, TX.
In a world where UPS gets to serve however they see fit, it's perfectly legal for the company to prioritize one over the other in terms of prompt delivery or to prioritize care that the mail arrives unmolested.
The USPIS needs probably cause to open your mail, as it's protected under the Fourth Amendment.
Meanwhile at Fedex or UPS, the little old nosy lady at the counter can bust into any package she finds "suspicious". And you have no recourse.
I'm not sure how many people realize this.
Well sometimes a lotto game ends up with a flaw that allows an arbitrage opportunity - you can fill out every combination and walk away with a few hundred thousand or a few million. A small group of people spend incredible efforts, seemingly irrationally, to fill out every possible lotto combo...
Now imagine that lottery is for president of the United States.
Effectively if you can intercept and alter ballots, you only have to change the 'right precincts' to flip an election.
Just because the USPS works as is does not mean it couldn’t be better. This is a classic “I like things the way they are” problem. Where the other possibilities are unknown and inexperienced and so are not given equal weight to a decision.
I don’t particularly care whether the postal service is privatized or not. But the more we keep failing at things like public schools the more I’m inclined to align with privatization. Everything can be regulated to a degree that requires basic service levels.
But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?
If it is failing, which it is not, it is for the same political reasons as the USPS is “failing”, which it is not.
Now some of that is a familial issue but not all of it.
Has public schooling been a net positive? Oh wow yes, by many miles. Could it be better? By many miles, yes.
Saying it could be better does not negate past contributions.
When companies get big enough to serve the entire nation, a few million USD in fines won't make them stop.
> But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?
It's an intrinsic goal, set by those who truly do want to serve better. You can hire for that. USPS would have an easier time hiring the right people if they weren't hamstrung by billionaires weakening their foundations.
True. Intentional dismantling of an organization that can’t protect itself seems slightly out of bounds. However, that’s exactly what you would do in the private sector.
But regardless, people are driven by incentive. Appealing to humans with the notion of doing good but not being paid market price (through monetary or other tangible means) is ensuring that you will not attract top talent. You can trace it all the way back down through the evolutionary rabbit hole: incentive = security = procreation = genes that carry on.
That’s our basic human programming.
We should ensure access to a level playing field but we shouldn’t ignore our basic nature when constructing it.
For example, current day drones would excel at rural mail delivery. Bread and butter business opportunity for someone so inclined.
Just because one method is removed does not mean the product ceases to exist. If it’s valuable a provider will find it.
Regulation doesn’t seem to have helped in terms of bang for buck.
And some day you may ask why wealth should be a barrier to entry to anything.
The idea of privatization and inclusion are not mutually exclusive.
See: Health insurance industry
Also see: Internet service providers
Also also see: Publishing
We need to do better on healthcare. However I think we can all agree, the complexities of healthcare are far from those of the postal service.
ISPs are constantly under threat of new players, see SpaceX. The only way they can stick around is by adding value to their products. When was the last time you couldn’t get on the internet by two or more means? Cell phone and WiFi are almost always.
Publishing in particular though, this one doesn’t hold water. At no point in history has it ever been 1) easier to publish but also 2) easier to gain a audience. Publishing is fully democratized due to permissionless platforms enabled via the internet.
This fostering competition business is often a false narrative. If the USPS was dissolved, there would be hardly anything compelling UPS or FedEx to pick up its services. If they did, they'd be at an increased cost to consumers.
> Just because the USPS works as is does not mean it couldn’t be better.
In my original comment, I explicitly said "The USPS could be improved but struggles primarily due to active efforts to kill it off. But it's a wonderful idea of a service that definitely should exist and be improved." The problem is that the USPS is in a chokehold by politicians, starving it of funds and increasing its costs, yelling at it "why can't you do better?" Talk about "fair" competition. Of course public services should be improved.
> But the more we keep failing at things like public schools the more I’m inclined to align with privatization.
As I mentioned in my original comment, we should focus on improving these things. Public schools are poor for a variety of reasons, primarily political, and their problems are not inherent to their existence as a public service. My mom was a teacher for decades, as were her family members. I've seen why schools struggle, and it's not simply because they're a public service.
> But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?
What is UPS or FedEx's or any other company's incentive to do better? More capital and more money. Their incentive isn't to make people's lives better. It's to earn more money. It just so happens that these can overlap, but company's have few incentives to provide services to people. That's the entire point of public services. It's because there isn't an incentive for companies to provide them in a way that's beneficial and cost effective for the common people.
I would vote for this. Whatever we spend on public libraries, that money could be used to bring every residence land-line high-speed internet access.
I would also defund all public schools. Charter schools seem to be the future, but the legion of bureaucrats don't want to let go of their communist indoctrination pipeline.
As a tax payer, I don't want to subsidize people sending letters or packages. Much of the back haul and distribution has already been contracted out anyway.
> It's a minimum of $11 for UPS to come pickup your package at a residential address
Yeah, that's the real cost of that service. The fact that it's free for the USPS doing it means you're using other people's money.
Librarians also provide expertise in sourcing knowledge that isn't available online; particularly with the way that Google search has evolved.
Larger libraries also provide archivist roles and even small libraries may serve to archive local news and history.
There's already unemployment agencies. Maybe they can setup computers to assist the homeless. Or you know, the homeless shelter could have a computer for job searching.
I think the happiest rich people have a "wall" to push against and a "chair" to sit in when they're tired. Bill Gates has the health policy stuff to work on during the day, and his family to come back to in the evening. Jeff Bezos has Amazon to run, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have their companies and people to be around, average people have a job.
If you don't have that "thing" to chew on, if you just sit in on a board meeting and sip cocktails on a beach, it's easy to become lonely and feel like life is meaningless. You become like Notch and end up in a depressive spiral where you simultaneously have everything and nothing.
Not a psychologist or anything, just an interesting observation. No man is an island. Until he is, then he's Robinson Crusoe.
Markets are phenomenal things for the majority of goods and terrible things for a few goods (like common defence, the judiciary and pollution control). The post office is in the latter case - some people need to subsidize the system in order for (say) rural deliveries to take place.
The benefit of having a single universal system is important in a world where an enormous amount of things that are necessary to a functioning society (say, jury summons, or voting pamphlets or other government paperwork) need to be accessible to every single citizen in the democracy.
Eventually the Internet can replace most of these things, but then the government of a democracy needs to ensure that literally every citizen has free and reasonable access to the internet without meaningful burden, lest it disenfranchise the poor and the rural.
Oddly, the whole "defund the post office" thing seems to be mostly a Republican issue. I say oddly, because the Democratic base tend to be from more densely populated states and from larger cities in those states. These people are least likely to be affected by a lack of post office as commercial delivery services can supply the majority of their mailing needs in a pinch. The people most affected are people in large states like Texas, especially those outside of the cities, where it's less economical to deliver to.
Not to mention all of the other federal services that post office provide that would ultimately go away if the post office did. Things like passport processing, for example.
Honestly, I'm still kind of amazed at how people can be convinced to so consistently call for things that are against their own interests in the name of some abstract idea like "religion!" or "the market!.
To the people that run marketing and political campaigns, and utility companies.
Over 95% of all mail is not personal correspondence. ~50% is advertisements.
The UPS price probably reflects the fact it’s only allowed to compete with the USPS on an rigged, uneven playing field, through a legal loophole for “extremely urgent letters”.
And I wouldn't mind “killing” my local public library (despite spending hours playing Minecraft and Roblox there in my youth) in favor of the Internet Archive et al.¹, and public schools in favor of private schools that prioritize customer satisfaction over union agreements². And deunionize the police while we're at it: many of the violent acts and actual human killings BLM and others protest were perpetrated by repeat offenders kept in the force because of unions. After unionizing, police are 40% more likely to use violence.³
Camden, New Jersey fired their entire police force, hired a new union-less one, and decreased there murder rate while saving money that could then be spent on libraries, schools, etc. Private police have successfully served many communities.⁴
1: Edit: My area has private little lending libraries the size of large newspaper dispensers scattered around it, which work great because the area's dense and walkable; other less dense areas have libraries on wheels in the form of trucks and vans.
2: One of my favorite high school teachers was fired for lack of seniority because of union rules, and private and charter schools seem better by every measure I know of.
3: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3095217
4: https://reason.com/video/dont-abolish-the-police-privatize-t....
It can be seen with the reduction to these functions to expand the police departments.
From those figures it looks like > 90% of the USPS throughput benefits the marketing operations of private companies and scammers.
I'm speechless.
And a future where I don’t have giant boxes “delivered” into my tiny mailbox that could fit maybe a stack of 25 envelopes.
And a future where 20% of packages don’t arrive.
I can see why people want to avoid this.
Every aspect of my experience with USPS is dissatisfying - they can't be defunded soon enough.
See:
https://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-of...
The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. There needs to be significant value that others cannot meet. The reformation that is needed is being blocked.
For example, how about allowing me to pay $5 a month to not have you deliver crap into my inbox? Or to fully digitize the process, so I don't have a recycle bin full of crappy products, alumni magazines, and pizza coupons that I don't need or want.
Oh. And stop selling my data to third parties as well. Looking at you NCOA database.
Advertising is a money maker and it subsidizes the other business. I don't really see a problem with this.
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/fedex-smartpost/network...
People in Barrow, Alaska deserve access to mailing services as much as people in NYC. Without that, there is no reliable way to contact everyone in the US for the purpose of the Census, Voting (where mail-in voting is available), Jury Duty notifications, Selective Service, etc.
There are critical government services that still must be run over "snail mail" and to pass that off to a private institution which will not be able to service all areas equally will lead to more inequality.
That's one of the biggest operational problems. They don't deliver consistently to rural areas. These companies farm it out. See FedEx Smart Post
I feel like something here needs to change. I’m not really advocating for getting rid of USPS, but if the only leg it’s standing on is delivering to rural areas, I feel like we need to take a look at different options.
It certainly isn't The Market(tm), because the for profit companies have explicitly rejected it. Or are rural people supposed to just suck it up, and lose a constitutionally mandated service for ideological reasons?
What do you think we should do?
I really have a hard time justifying paying for the USPS when 90% of my mail is junk mail that I don't want. the other 10% I can probably live with not getting. I understand your point about the fire department, but I find value in that so I don't care if it turns a profit - but if I'm not getting value from the USPS and the argument is that someone who chooses to live 50 miles from the nearest town isn't able to get mail... it just isn't compelling to me.
[Edit: I had a double-not, hopefully everyone understood my meaning before.]
We could fund it ourselves through the government instead, but why?
And then those things are handed off to the USPS for "last mile" delivery to the millions of rural addresses that UPS and FedEx don't delivery to directly with their own vehicles.
USPS serves some very critical purposes, and ensuring mail 'works' for all citizens, even those with deep rural addresses, is one of them.
And the post office. The mail came every day. Sending a letter to anywhere cost $0.25, just like your were mailing it from New York City. It was, literally, a lifeline.
It is often useful to require individuals pay for services they consume -- and for that payment to reflect the cost of the service.
What is the benefit gained by socializing the cost of remote deliveries instead of linking the price with the cost?
A secondary problem is that Congress will interfere with decisions to reduce service in unprofitable areas but not officially subsidize it. This makes the post office appear to be unprofitable because we see the cost of having service in rural areas but don’t directly record the costs to the people who live there and the business which otherwise would not happen without that service.
This is a common talking point, but is factually incorrect.
(1) The USPS hasn't made any of those payments since 2013. Their current financial woes aren't caused by the requirement since their not making the payments.
(2) Pensions are required to be fully funded. In practice that's a bit more theoretical than actual, but the USPS isn't being treated any different.
>The agency would be in a much stronger financial position had Congress not passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, which “requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056,” on a 50-year basis.
> According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2019: “If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.”
>“[N]o other entity, private or public, has to make” such provision for future health benefits of current and future retirees so far in advance. Private companies also can change their health benefits without an act of Congress, unlike the Postal Service. “Current reserves of $47.5 billion could be used to pay expected pay-as-you-go retiree health care costs 10-15 years into the future,” IPS noted.
>The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from obtaining other revenue by providing “nonpostal services,” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices. And it also limits the ability of the Postal Service to raise rates beyond the rate of inflation.
(1) Book profit: it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. But that's a meaningless point. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit. These pension obligations are real costs that have to be accounted for.
(2) Cash flow: This is where pension prefunding comes into play. The USPS is running out of cash and if they didn't have to save it would take them longer to do so. But since they're not actually making the payments the law doesn't impact their cash position.
The USPS has about a 100 billion dollars in pension liability that they can't pay. And they haven't actually made money in like 15 years. Tax payers are on the hook for that and the amount they're on the hook for goes up by billions every year.
From the postmaster general:
>. In order to ensure that we had sufficient liquidity to fulfill our primary statutory mission of providing universal postal service, we were forced to default on $33.9 billion in mandated prefunding payments for RHB for the years 2012 through 2016. Additionally, we did not make $6.9 billion in payments due to OPM in both 2017 and 2018 for normal costs and amortization of RHB, Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), and Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) unfunded liabilities. Without these defaults, the deferral of critical capital investments, and the aggressive management actions described above, we would not have been able to pay our employees, our suppliers, or deliver the mail.
>Due to the factors outlined above, we do not have sufficient cash to meet all of our existing legal obligations, fully pay down our debt, and maintain a sufficient level of liquidity to ensure continuity of postal operations and meet our universal service obligation.
You're skirting the primary issue. This "cost" is manufactured and is a burden that no other entity (private or governmental) even comes close to having to bear. It's all in the submitted article but here's more. From [0]:
>Passed by a Republican-led Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, the PAEA gave the Postal Service new accounting and funding rules for its retiree pension and health benefits. Up until 2006, the USPS funded those obligations on a pay-as-you-go-basis, pulling out of its pension fund and adding to it as retirees' costs came in. But the PAEA required the Postal Service to calculate all of its likely pension costs over the next 75 years, and then sock away enough money between 2007 and 2016 to cover most of them.
>This is one of those ideas that sounds responsible on the surface but is actually pretty nuts.
>Consider your average 30-year mortgage. What if you had to set aside a few hundred thousand dollars right now, enough to pay the whole thing, even if you were still going to make payments over 30 years? No one would ever take out a mortgage. That's the whole point: the costs only come in over time, and the income you use to pay them comes in over time as well. It works exactly the same for retiree pensions and benefit funds. Which is why, as economist Dean Baker pointed out to Congress, pretty much no one else does what the PAEA demanded of the Postal Service.
>Meeting Congress' arbitrary mandate required putting away an extra $5.6 billion per year. "It is equivalent to imposing a tax of 8 percent on the Postal Service's revenue," Baker said. "There are few businesses that would be able to survive if they were suddenly required to pay an 8 percent tax from which their competitors were exempted."
Then, citing a quote form the Postmaster General that contradicts your position, you said:
> This is where pension prefunding comes into play. The USPS is running out of cash and if they didn't have to save it would take them longer to do so. But since they're not actually making the payments the law doesn't impact their cash position.
But they made payments from 2007 to 2012 (at the expense of modernizing). The Inspector General is pretty clear on this (emphasis mine) [0]:
> Eventually, the burden became too great, and the USPS began defaulting on the PAEA payments in 2012. But the damage was done. The Postal Service lost $62.4 billion between 2007 and 2016, and its own Inspector General attributed $54.8 billion of that to prefunding retiree benefits. Without the PAEA, the Postal Service wouldn't be doing stellar. (Though you could plausibly blame many of its remaining struggles on the Great Recession.) But it probably would've spent at least part of the last decade making comfortable profits.
> "The Postal Service's $15 billion debt is a direct result of the mandate," the Inspector General wrote in 2015. "This requirement has deprived the Postal Service of the opportunity to invest in capital projects and research and development."
And from [1]:
>The deep hole of debt that is currently facing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is entirely due to the burdensome prepayments for future retiree health care benefits imposed by Congress in the PAEA. By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion). This $19.5 billion deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.
[0]: https://theweek.com/articles/767184/how-george-bush-broke-po... [1]: https://mronline.org/2011/09/23/the-manufactured-financial-c...
See also: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-04/congre...
Side note: Admittedly, these are opinions pieces but appear to be well sourced (especially [1]). If you have any numbers or quotes that contradict these then by all means provide them.
It's not manufactured. They are making promises that have a net present value of X dollars. That's a real cost they are incurring and it has to go on their profit/loss statement.
>Up until 2006, the USPS funded those obligations on a pay-as-you-go-basis,
No company is allowed to do that. All companies are required to fully fund their pensions:
>The funding requirement under PPA is simply that a plan must stay fully funded (that is, its assets must equal or exceed its liabilities). If a plan is fully funded, the minimum required contribution is the cost of benefits earned during the year. If a plan is not fully funded, the contribution also includes the amount necessary to amortize over seven years the difference between its liabilities and its assets. Stricter rules apply to severely underfunded plans (called "at-risk status").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Retirement_Income_Sec...
> But it probably would've spent at least part of the last decade making comfortable profits.
You have to keep cash flow and profit clear. The prefunding requirement does not change their profitability. It changes their cash flow.
> If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.
Again, not in the black. They would have $20 billion dollars more in the bank but they would not be profitable. Simply put, they'd have a larger pile of cash to burn before the day of reckoning came.
An analogy would be someone jumping off a very tall bridge. They're dead the moment the feet leave the bridge. Saying that they would survive longer if they jumped off the top of the bridge is technically true but doesn't appreciably change anything. They're still dead. It will just take a bit longer and the splat at the bottom will be more impressive.
> If a plan is fully funded, the minimum required contribution is the cost of benefits earned during the year.
The USPS however, needs to fund not only the current year’s expenses, but also all expenses for the 50 following years. No one else needs to do this.
> In this subsection, the term `Postal surplus or supplemental liability' means the estimated difference, as determined by the Office, between-- ``(A) the actuarial present value of all future benefits payable from the Fund under this subchapter to current or former employees of the United States Postal Service and attributable to civilian employment with the United States Postal Service; and
They have to fund the benefits that employees have earned. Not all of the pension cost that will be accrued over the next 50 years. That requirement is the exact same as private sector pension plans.
>That requirement is the exact same as private sector pension plans.
This is where you are confused. The bill has to do with pre-funding of health (and similar) benefits and not pensions.
Which brings us back to your original claim:
>This is a common talking point, but is factually incorrect. (1) The USPS hasn't made any of those payments since 2013. Their current financial woes aren't caused by the requirement since their not making the payments. (2) Pensions are required to be fully funded. In practice that's a bit more theoretical than actual, but the USPS isn't being treated any different.
Point (2) is incorrect since we aren't talking about pensions. Point (1) is incorrect as per the numerous sources I provided already (including a direct quote from the Postmaster General). But here's one more:
>the 2006 law requiring the pre-funding of health benefits for future retirees — not pensions — has put a financial strain on the Postal Service and hurt its ability to turn a profit in some recent years.
From https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/wi...
Conclusion: The current financial woes of the USPS are can be attributed in large part to the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
The law did a lot including:
Postal Civil Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding Amendments of 2006 - (Sec. 802) Relieves the Postal Service of an obligation to contribute matching amounts to its employees' civil service retirement. Provides for a mechanism and an amortization schedule regarding the handling of any surplus or supplemental liability of the Postal Service regarding the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Transfers from the Postal Service to the Treasury certain retirement obligations related to military service of former Postal Service employees. Makes Office of Personnel Management (OPM) determinations on surplus or supplemental liability subject to PRC review if the Postal Service so requests
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407
> Point (1) is incorrect as per thttps://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407... numerous sources I provided already (including a direct quote from the Postmaster General)
I think you're confused here. Straight from the Postmaster general:
> we were forced to default on $33.9 billion in mandated prefunding payments for RHB for the years 2012 through 2016
https://about.usps.com/news/testimony/2019/pr19_pmg0430.htm
>the 2006 law requiring the pre-funding of health benefits for future retirees — not pensions — has put a financial strain on the Postal Service and hurt its ability to turn a profit in some recent years.
Sigh, and we're back to the same confusion. Pre-funding has ZERO impact on profit. If you incur a cost today it goes on your balance sheet. The fact that the actual cash doesn't leave the company for 30 years doesn't change that.
You've just moved the goal posts. Your assertion was "Their current financial woes aren't caused by the requirement since their not making the payments."
Even though you've moved the goal posts, you're still wrong. Do you agree that having $0 available for infrastructure improvements, technology upgrades, delivery fleets, and R&D to improve efficiency for the past 14 years has had zero impact on current profit?
Really? Be honest.
Imagine if UPS had not upgraded (other than the basics) their hardware, software, and massive delivery fleet in a decade and a half. That amount of time is an absolute eternity in the areas of automation, transport and computing. Can you imagine where UPS would be right now in relation to FedEx has it stopped investing in itself since before the iPhone was invented?
Since you missed it. Once again, here's the relevant Postmaster General quote:
> "The Postal Service's $15 billion debt is a direct result of the mandate, this requirement has deprived the Postal Service of the opportunity to invest in capital projects and research and development."
Look, you've been arguing this entire time that the issue was pensions when it wasn't. And that it was the same rules for everybody (it wasn't). The other half of your argument was that the current financial position of the USPS is unrelated to the 2006 act. Provably wrong.
But since that original argument is falling apart you've changed your position to "the USPS is currently unprofitable". Well, obviously.
You're clearly not debating in good faith so I'm done here. Good day to you.
The change introduced by the 2006 PAEA impacts however the funding of health care benefits of retirees, which have to be funded at 100%. This is not required of private sector companies.
Additionally, to build up this future retiree health benefits fund, a very front loaded schedule of about $5.7B yearly between 2006 and 2016 was chosen. In fact, the USPS was not able to fulfill this schedule and defaulted on multiple payments.
Best source I have found: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40983.pdf
“ If the costs of this retiree health care mandate were removed from the USPS financial statements, the Post Office would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.”
…
“ Allowing USPS once again to pay the costs of retiree health care costs on a pay-as-you-go basis as the rest of the federal government and two-thirds of private industry currently do, is the biggest step that could be taken to assure long-term financial sustainability”
…
“ Restricting USPS retirement assets to investment in special Treasury bonds has negatively impacted returns, relative to corporate pension funds, and therefore required USPS to set aside larger sums of money to meet its financial obligations to retirees.”
They ultimately found a way around it but shut down due to lack of sign-ups[1], so it seems like USPS saved themselves some time.
“[we] knew that the USPS would not be able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost savings.”
The terrible thing - you CANNOT opt out of the junk mail, at least in the past (hopefully this has changed).
I have no interest in the USPS as a result. What type of business that is supposed to be providing a service FORCES its future and current customers to kill trees for junk mail that will go into the trash.
If the govt didn't allow for spam filters on email, email would be dying too.
https://www.mw-direct.com/blog/posts/first-class-mail-vs-sta...
And with EDDM you cannot get out of this spam blast.
Volume has nothing to do with revenue, which is precisely what the original poster pointed to and was being refuted:
> The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service.
But if are in a 50 unit building and you see those big stacks of advertising being plonked into the mailroom, that's what those are.
"irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients."
A non-trivial percentage of "first class" mail is actually spam. The difference is in quality of service (delivery times for first class is significantly faster in some circumstances then marketing).
I do agree that that there is value in daily mail delivery, but my point is that the value needs to be enhanced, rather then just continue in what it is today. Cut service where it doesn't make sense (go to every other day), encourage people to use email, which is way less wasteful, and less harmful for the environment, focus on rural routes.
Hundreds of millions of people use first class mail to pay their bills, rent, etc. and for all sorts of other things where those other delivery services would be needlessly expensive. The "basic problem" is that the post office is not permitted to set prices for first class mail or vary them where they lose money with every delivery, and yet they're expected by some to be run profitably "like a business."
> The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people.
Because what the country really needs right now is a greater number of unstable jobs.
I think it's a "stable" job, although the retirement benefits and so on that a USPS letter carrier gets, for example, are not what they once were, and the post office also relies more on "non-career employees" than they used to.
The elimination of money orders from the USPS alone would push more people to already-abusive payday lenders.
I suggest doing some research before presenting guesses as fact.
Marketing email was 23% of USPS's revenue (53% of volume) in 2019.
Probably because as a chartered non-government company they have a politically appointed Postmaster General who takes their orders from the POTUS. No company is required to fund pensions for 75 years. No company has their prices set by Congress. And no company has been a bigger political football than the USPS.
> it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people.
I believe they have tried in the past, oh what's that, blocked because Postmaster General doesn't want it.
USPS is by far the worst mail service I have ever encountered. It's so bad that there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that one can do a lot better, assuming one is allowed to compete. And even though they proudly say they receive NO money from the federal government, they do receive subsidies in the hundreds of millions.
My experience with other countries is Israel and Russia's postal systems, which are both notoriously bad at actually delivering mail. USPS doesn't ever seem to lose my mail, and stuff gets to where I send it in ~3 days, so I've always been a happy customer.
Not to mention consistently misdelivering my mail to other mailboxes. One time, I had to escalate all the way to the region supervisor before I found someone that would actually hear me out. The general attitude seems to be one of incompetence and total indifference.
Essentially none of the major commercial delivery services in the US seem to know anything about actually delivering packages.
UPS/Fedex/FBA/DHL just drop it in front of my house and don't even bother ringing the doorbell. It rains here a good amount and if you don't notice your ghost package fast, maybe it gets soaked through.
Fedex has lied to me multiple times about attempting delivery on days they never did.
But even setting these things aside, USPS is almost always a better experience as either sender or receiver than any of the other competitors in the US.
The USPS tithe isn't the bottleneck, but it would definitely make sense to unwind once a private carrier could break the $2/letter barrier.
This was a normal apartment, in a normal apartment building, in a fairly nice part of town. The only way I ever got a Fedex package (several were sent back as "undeliverable") was if I knew it was coming in advance, to go online with the tracking # and instruct them to hold the delivery for me at the local Fedex office. Then I could pick it up in person.
Fortunately, the local Fedex office was only 2 blocks away from my apartment on the same street.
USPS delivered 100% of my letters and packages on time.
Yes, it is subsidized. The reason is that being able to send and receive mail cheaply and reliably is the cornerstone of our society and our economic system.
When people talk about International Mail being "subsidized" they're talking about EG treaty negotiations with China that force the USPS to receive international packages from China at significantly below cost. They then have to pass those costs onto the US consumer.
I've not seen any citation which claims the junk mail part of the USPS is unprofitable.
To be clear, I hate junk mail. I've just seen this claim made a few times without citation.
The USPS was founded in 1792 and became self-funded under the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 almost 200 years later, so, no, it hasn't “always” been required to pay for itself.
Maybe they just need to reduce their footprint, and close underutilized sites.
My mailbox stuffed with junk mail all the time (even if I have permanent sticker telling them not to do so). I've even talked to the USPS delivery person and told her not to do so. Next week, same issue. Rinse, repeat.
I've never, ever, ever had a problem with Fedex or UPS. They've been 100% professional and everytime I had to interact with them either on the phone or in a store, I always got good service. With USPS, this was the rare exception rather than the rule.
In the US, I mailed something to my mom across town, and she got it the same day that I put it in the mailbox. I rarely saw a letter delivery take more than 2-3 days. Here in Canada, it may take over a week to send mail in the same province. Takes over a month when my mom sends me a letter from the US.
IMHO, they shouldn't get subsidies. They should be a public utility. They provide a necessary channel of communication between citizens and their goverment: taxes, passports, ballots, voter registration, etc. happen through USPS. In my experience (admittedly, I've been in Canada for a decade, so this is probably out of date) they've been much more reliable than any other shipping service, and I don't think any other private carrier does letter mail.
Also receive lots of documents, periodicals, and packages through USPS, never had a problem there either, always in the mailbox or right at the front door. Of course I'd like to skip the junk mail.
USPS seems technically up-to-date as well, more or less. I can schedule pickups on-line, as well as buy and print postage. No complaints.