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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS. I think USPS doesn't need to be aggressively profitable, but it should at least aim towards being as self-sufficient as reasonably possible. I don't see an issue with this.

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Sure, but then when something goes severely wrong, you wind up thinking of things to better fund USPS.

This logic could be applied to literally anything, so your argument is effectively that the government should never fund anything.

If there is a war, cancer/disease research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund cancer/disease research.

If suddenly a famine strikes, war is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't fund the military.

If a sudden deadly disease arises, funding for food security/research is going to be less important, so the government shouldn't be funding any of that as well.

You're straw-manning their argument to be much more all or nothing than it is. Definitely if there's a total war economy, there's going to be less money for other things, even if that thing is "keeping future inflation in the single digits".

Exactly. Nobody expects the welfare office to be self sufficient, what are they gonna do, charge all the recipients?

But a mail and parcel service, something that the private sector does profitably, shouldn't be deeply in the red though a little from time to time is probably fine.

On the other hand though, if the private parcel service had to fund 40 years of pensions instead of giving out 401k's, and were obligated to serve unprofitable routes, they'd be deeply in the red. It's not a remotely level playing field, so it's no wonder the government parcel service is having problems.

I wouldn't consider the USPS to be deeply in the red when compared with other government operations.

deeply in the red is your phrase, not mine

> It's not a remotely level playing field

What's causing the unlevel playing field?

Various acts of Congress that force them to take on a huge amount of debt and force them to run unprofitable routes. A private company has no such requirements.

Oh yes, true, the Post Office in the UK has the same burden. I more meant the pensions.

It costs 15x as much to use a private sector mail service as the USPS.

I can imagine it would cost a bit more, because corporation tax, and you probably can't afford to run a year where you lose $8.8bn[0].

Although I thought USPS had an enforced monopoly on US mail, so how did you do the comparison with private sector mail?

[0] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-...

I looked up the cost to FedEx an envelope to somewhere in the US. Looks like $10 is about standard (unless you want to go too far or too rural). The USPS will send an envelope anywhere for $0.74. 10/0.74 = 13.5x

The USPS has a monopoly on traditional delivery to a mailbox. So FedEx walks all the way to the door which makes it not "traditional delivery"

> The USPS has a monopoly on traditional delivery to a mailbox. So FedEx walks all the way to the door which makes it not "traditional delivery"

Sometimes I find Amazon packages in my mailbox, though I know sometimes amazon will use USPS, so could just be them.

The downstream benefits of a well functioning USPS could be worth running it at a loss. If efforts to make it profitable make the service worse, then it could be a net negative.

You obviously haven't lived in rural america.

On a side note related to your comment, just one side benefit of urbanization would be more efficient delivery of services (including delivery services).

Thankfully, the government guarantees it will deliver letters to some remote rural places at a price private companies can't touch, but we can do better to make life easier for everyone: the mail man, the people wanting their mail, etc.

I agree that urbanization makes delivery much more efficient. My point was that if USPS goes away, there are many areas of rural america that simply won't be served because it is too expensive.

And the perverse incentive of this direction of thinking is that when you elect people with this thought pattern they prove the point by sabotaging the service. Then they say "see, government is ineffective ", and either directly pocket the resulting money (corruption) or give it to their rich friends (oligarchy).

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