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Comment by ashdksnndck | Hacker News Reader

Congress has mandated that USPS has to be self-funding. If the leadership at USPS fails to raise revenue, they are forced to cut services. You could write a letter to your senator.

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Of course Congress risks a potential Constitutional Crisis in that mandate. The USPS is one of the only services of the federal government that is Constitutionally mandated. The contradiction of Congress wanting USPS to act as if it were a for profit business remains an interesting balancing act versus the Constitution.

(It's also not a surprise that the Congressional mandate to run the USPS as a for-profit has been used as much to make the USPS profits a slush fund of "free money" that Congress can use for non-USPS projects, including pork barrel projects. The for-profit mandate isn't just for threatening the shutdown of USPS services.)

Less junk mail? Junk mail only 5 days a week instead of 6? Sounds like a good deal to me!

I was very saddened to find out that junk mail is what funds the postal service.

>You could write a letter to your senator.

Would take way more than one letter to make USPS profitable.

The point is to state that USPS should not need to be profitable. Governments (and government-run services) shouldn’t exist to be profitable.

If you want them to exist you they can't just ignore all finances. USPS had a break even mandate from 1970-2006. They projected revenue and priced services to break even. That was scrapped in 2006 and they had a price cap put on services which now puts everything into jeopardy. They havent been break even since.

Their core business has been declining for the past 20 years and business mailer lobbyists work very hard to keep the current price caps. This idea that we should let the finances spin out of control and raise taxes is a recent idea.

Why doesn’t that logic apply to Congress? The President? The Supreme Court? The Police? Highways and interstates? The military? The CDC?

Particularly ironic given that a maintaining a "Post Office" is one of the few federal institutions specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

Agreed, but you missed the joke

And it really was a great joke. It caught me by surprise, and I spent more time laughing at it than I should have.

Write to tell your senator to have USPS pay for unlimited usage of their service/data by other companies?

No to remove the cap on pricing. USPS was break even from 1970-2006 until the 2006 law that forbid them from raising prices. The business mailers love it though.

Companies are already using the roads, police, fire services (where applicable) and many other government services without paying directly for them. But the taxes! you'll scream - yes exactly!

Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.

>Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.

Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.

It leads to a growing society which generates more taxes to fund the growing budgets. A virtuous circle.

When will you learn? Taxes are not “the bane” of the EU, taxes are why It’s a nice place to live and America isn’t.

Tragedy of the commons thing, though, right?

Speaking for a patchwork of samples that have fascinated me in the U.S.—New developments tend to incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms… in some cases they attempt, at least notionally, to recoup the cost of the investigation from criminals upon conviction (I hear the collections rates are unimpressive…). Heck, some places bill inmates for each night in jail! [0]

Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…

All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs in relation to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…

[0] seriously! https://www.flsheriffs.org/uploads/Subsistence%20Fee%20Final...

One could make a good argument that broadband and mobile data services are more basic and critical than mail delivery at this point.

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