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Comment by gok | Hacker News Reader

Primary argument is that most of the entire rest of the world has moved to profitable, privatized mail carrying.

I find it hard to believe that most of the rest of the world has, but it seems some countries have. Many countries don't really have functioning mail delivery, whether public or private.

The CATO Institute says "The U.S. ranks near the bottom of the Consumer Postal Council’s 26‐ country 'Index of Postal Freedom.'"[1], but they only looked at 26 countries, and even then, I'm not sure what that index looks at. I found a report from 2012 but it's long and I'm not gonna dig into it now.

Do you have examples of which countries have and what led to the change?

[1]: https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/privat...

The USPS would be profitable if it didn't have to pre-fund its pension obligations by an 75 years - an obligation no other government regulated entity must abide by.

https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/

The prepayment period ended in 2016. It is not to blame for current losses.

The USPS doesn't depend on any government funding. Nearly all of its revenue comes from postage. Why is it so important for it to be private if it's not costing taxpayer money?

Hmm, this may be a dumb question, but when the USPS loses money, where does that money come from? I assumed it was just topped up by the government but maybe not.

It seems like they've been getting by so far partly by skipping payments to the pension and health funds.[1] I don't know what they will do once that's not possible. Seek external funding? Sell some post office land? No idea what their options are or what they're allowed to do.

1. https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/us_postal_service_financial_v...

Wow, I guess it surprises me that it seems as if the government isn't paying anything to the USPS, even backstopping it when it has losses.

If that's true and it's not costing the federal government any money, I'm struggling more to see the reason to privatize.

PS...thank you for finding that link!

USPS actually ends up being a net-earner for the US Government. It's actually one of the few branches that has no allocated budget and has enough of an internal surplus that it's actually been able to afford to innovate. However, that shifted in 2006 when it was burdened with pre-paying for retiree health benefits. If anything - we need some deregulation around the post office to allow it to remain profitable, it's currently shackled by the government in what actions it can take and the 10billion in funding offered by the executive branch comes with some really heavy strings attached that'd actually further restrict what it can do to retain fiscal independence.

I think it's also important to take stock in just how well USPS works - if you compare it to CanadaPost the differences are astonishing, USPS has managed to keep the unions happy while also keeping costs relatively low - I'm sure a lot of passionate people poured their lives into threading the needle on how to keep everything running smoothly, it's quite the success case.

Yeah, the more I engage in this thread and topic, the more I'm learning how it seems the USPS does a pretty darn good job.

Got any sources for that claim? The transition in Israel, for example, resulted in what can only be described as a national joke.

Germany.

They’ve done so well after privatization, they now operate globally and are the world’s largest courier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Post

DHL operates in my home country, Norway, where they are the bottom of the barrel. If I can, I avoid shopping online at places that uses DHL; they're that bad.

The only part of the world's mail services that moved to profitable and privatized mail, is mail service for high-margin packages to cities and large towns.

The day that UPS will be obligated to deliver a first-class letter from East Bufu, Oklohoma (population 68 people, and 837 cows), to Seward, Alaska (population 2,736 people and 14 grizzly bears), for 55 cents, is the day that their privatized business model will stop being profitable.

There are two counter-arguments to that:

1) UPS is not allowed to deliver first class mail to a letterbox, or at the same cost as USPS.

2) Why should short-distance mail subsidize long-distance mail?

> UPS is not allowed to deliver first class mail to a letterbox,

So? They regularly leave packages on your porch, they'd do the same for letters.

> or at the same cost as USPS.

Which is insanely low and money-losing in many cases. And first-class mail is a declining business. Do they even want that?

I was responding to a comment that said: "The day that UPS will be obligated to deliver a first-class letter... for 55 cents". UPS is legally required to charge at least six times more, and cannot use letterboxes.[1] The use of letterboxes is a cost-savings; if it were not a competitive advantage, the USPS wouldn't need a law protecting it.

Whether or not UPS wants the business is beside the point, and they currently cannot have it.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/601

The letterbox might have been a competitive advantage when people weren't accustomed to having stuff delivered to their porch. Not anymore. Ditto for a first-class mail monopoly - advantageous when people actually wrote letters, practically useless today.

Letterbox delivery is a competitive advantage because it saves money on delivery; the driver can often drop letters off in a mail room at a multi-unit dwelling, or by the road in the suburbs/rural areas.

We're only talking about first-class mail here, so a 6x cost advantage in first-class mail is very important.

> Whether or not UPS wants the business is beside the point, and they currently cannot have it.

It's the entire point actually.

The key part of my post is:

> The day that UPS will be obligated... to deliver a letter for 55 cents

The USPS is forced to provide this service - at a ridiculously low price. The second that UPS and Fedex have to play by the same rules (By being forced to deliver negative-margin mail), they will stop being profitable.

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