I agree. But why should we think of it that way?
The Postal Service was originally conceived as an essential piece of national infrastructure. Why should we think of it as an "independent" entity that needs to turn a profit? Does the highway system turn a profit? How about the Federal Reserve, or the National Institutes of Health?
What's important is that the USPS continue to have enough funding to provide its service in an accessible, timely, and reliable manner. That is what makes it a critical piece of infrastructure. Like it or not, it is still essential to be able to communicate with hard copies.
(Why? For one thing, we don't, as citizens, all have an official electronic mail box. Physical mail also bears information about its transport -- where it went, whether anyone else read it along the way, whether it was delivered and read -- in a way that most electronic communication doesn't. We don't have a unified way of finding out how to communicate with someone online, and the means we do have are all owned by private corporations that cannot be relied on to provide that information in perpetuity. And so on.)
I agree that, for many things, there are ways to communicate that have advantages the Postal Service doesn't offer. But I cannot imagine having to sacrifice what makes that service valuable in the name of making it profitable, or always having to rely on alternative services, especially for critical or official communication. We're going to need a public post office for some time yet. And as communication continues to move online, the need for a reliable, public system for delivering that communication will grow even further.
Yes.
$45 billion in 2009: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01...
Earnings beyond the cost of operations are returned to the US Treasury:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/generalinfo/faq/faqfrs.htm#6
kb
Anyway, here's a web page with an extract from the US federal court: http://www.healthfreedom.info/Federal_Reserve_Fraud.htm
"Examining the organization and function of the Federal Reserve Banks, and applying the relevant factors, we conclude that the Reserve Banks are not federal instrumentalities for purposes of the FTCA, but are independent, privately-owned and locally controlled corporations." [Lewis vs. U.S., 680 F. 2d 1239, 1241]"
See also: http://seekingalpha.com/article/125092-grand-illusion-the-fe...
If anyone mildly sophisticated wanted to tamper with postal mail it would be trivial to do so. Most important mail these days is sent via Fedex, DHL, and UPS.
Letters don't cost $0.20 to send via the USPS either, unless you're a bulk marketer who is offered a huge discount to send people garbage. I have tried to opt out of all the unsolicited mail (coupons, flyers, magazines, etc.) and they keep sending it. It all (thankfully) gets recycled but it's a huge waste.
I also don't buy the argument that rural route customers should pay the same price for mail as anyone else. If you live in a rural area you get some benefits (cheaper land) and you should have to pay extra for infrastructure that is not efficiently offered when houses are 3 miles apart.
Flat-rate delivery of mail is a necessary social equalizer. It would be entirely unfair to deny rural residents access to communication. In many cases they are the ones growing the food we eat, mining the coal that powers our PCs, etc. In exchange for providing valuable services in places we don't want to live, we should isolate them further?
For example:
Every day my mailbox is filled with paper that goes directly into the recycle bin. USPS representatives sell direct marketing services to businesses who send all this junk mail because it's so inexpensive to send.
Imagine if your ISP was affiliated with a spammer. This is effectively what the USPS does and it wastes lots of time, paper, and other resources.
The reason the USPS supports paper spam is simply to help fund its egalitarian mission of delivering mail in spite of too-low prices. The USPS does not pay the cost of recycling the paper or the cost of emptying everyone's mailbox of it every day. These are significant negative externalities.
Instead, why not simply subsidize rural mail by giving residents of rural areas some free stamps every month? It seems that making the rest of us deal with removing unwanted garbage from our mailboxes every day is a horribly inefficient way to achieve the egalitarian objective you cite.
A $8.5 billion subsidy to cover this last year's losses could have bought 20 million Americans iPads/netbooks.
If we're going to subsidize universal service, let's do it in a modern fashion. And let's focus on those people and regions that would get left out otherwise. There's no need to federalize things everywhere -- including in cities where competing alternatives would be eager to operate -- to cover a few edge cases for poor and rural delivery.
What, exactly, would that achieve? Not the same function that the USPS does. Sure, 20 million more people would have a device, but they wouldn't have a "U.S. Email address" in the same way that they have a "U.S. Mail address". They would just have a way to use someone else's privately-owned infrastructure. Who knows how long that would last, or how reliable it would be?
If we're going to subsidize universal service, let's do it in a modern fashion.
I agree. But that means what we should be doing is building public infrastructure for new forms of communication, not farming it out to private infrastructure (which decides whether or not to deliver mail, first and foremost, on the basis of whether it is profitable) in order to save a buck. Let's have a national electronic service that:
- provides an "address" [1] to every citizen, with a directory that allows people to find each other
- provides guaranteed, reliable, on-time delivery at minimal cost to the sender
- guarantees secure communications
- provides a channel for official communications, from voting to tax forms to jury duty summons
[1] I'm not sure if "address" is the right metaphor or not. Certainly, a mere "government email address" wouldn't be sufficient. The basic point is that every individual citizen ought to have some sort of secure repository where they can receive communications of all kinds: email, documents, whatever. And it should be at least as easy to access this repository as it is to walk out your door to your mailbox. That means that, if people need a computer and Internet connection to access it, they must be provided with one; their hardware, software, and network connection must work at least as reliably as mail delivery does.
I understand the sentiment here, but I wonder what the alternative is. (Letting Facebook track your every move and communication?) Given that the communication is going to take place over somebody's infrastructure, I'd much rather have whoever controls it be accountable to the public.
It's in the public's interest to have a secure channel for communication (secure from everyone, including government agencies). The government is supposed to be our means of providing things that are in our interest. If it can't do that (or it won't do that without providing a back-door for its own domestic snooping), then we have a much more serious problem: a society which is a democracy in name only. I think this is a problem to be addressed, not an inevitability that we should be resigned to.
What I'd really like is a way to receive physical mail at a single "address" no matter where I am. If I'm traveling, living in a place temporarily for short-term work, studying, whatever, I don't want to have to keep updating my mailing address with companies and a dozen government agencies.
This would be great! It's a different problem, though: we're back in the realm of physical mail, rather than electronic communication.
Netflix addicts. I might only receive a Netflix 2-3 days a week, but making sure those days line up with 3 days of delivery per week would drop throughput to maybe once a week.
Netflix is seriously the only killer app left for the mail system. Everything else I get is either spam or bad news--before Netflix I only checked once a week.
I check the mail every day, religiously. Going to the mail box, waiting for the street to be clear of traffic, peering in, and returning with the mail brings me immense satisfaction. All this, even though I very rarely get mail addressed to me. I wouldn't complain, I understand the need for cuts, but the loss of my routine would sadden me greatly.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06...
>No other government agency - or private business - bears this kind of burden.
>As a result of the pre-funding mandate the USPS begins every fiscal year more than $5 billion in debt. In fact, the act requires the USPS to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retiree health care costs in just 10 years.
>If the pre-funding requirement weren't in place the Postal Service would actually have a $3.7 billion surplus - over $1 billion each year for the past three fiscal years - despite declining mail volume due to increased use of electronic mail and an economy in crisis.
http://www.peoplesworld.org/deficit-hawks-take-aim-at-postal...
Emphasis mine. It's just a generally insane burden that's not getting enough attention.
I don't have a problem with the postal service being in debt or unprofitable, I just don't think the service is needed, and it's troubling to me that there are laws preventing other firms from offering letter delivery services that compete with the USPS.
The USPS has no incentive to figure out how to deliver mail better when it is the only game in town.
If you are talking about improving service, as in the actual shipping service, you must be talking about their achievement of going from "losing a lot of packages", to "losing less than they used to". I've never understood it. I have NEVER lost a UPS or Fedex package. Yet, it is routine for a USPS package to just go "missing", just ask any big ebay seller.
Its also interesting that you assume prices must always go up to match inflation. If USPS was innovating in the right areas, they could drive down costs and deliver more efficiently.
Also, I just suggested the US government allow other approved companies the ability to put things in your mailbox without going to jail. Never said anything about their service.
If my own sphere of influence, I only know 1 person who _doesn't_ check their mail daily.
The future of the postal industry lies in the transit of physical goods - if they want to survive, they need to become very efficient at moving parcels and packages, and forget about the fiddly business of letters and bulk mail.
Here's a quick and drastic solution to the USPS problem. 1) Give them the ability to set their own prices. They have competition in the form of UPS and FedEx for large packages delivered to your door. Chances are those prices wouldn't change. The rate for a stamp would potentially double. Is that a bad thing? Seriously, what percentage of the stuff you get in the mail is actually useful? 10%? 5%? Yes, there are some businesses who depend on cheap mail, but in effect the US taxpayer is subsidizing their business then. It's no different than the US bailing out the car companies in that regard. This price increase would probably decrease mail volume considerably. 2) Reduce delivery to 3 days a week. Would anyone complain about this? How many people even check their mail every single day without fail? Again, this may hurt mail-based businesses, but they are already existing in an artificial business environment skewed by government subsidies. Going from 6 days to 3 wouldn't cut costs 50%, but I think 20-25% cut in costs is reasonable to expect, considering the volume decrease.
These two things would quickly make the USPS profitable. As everyone here has pointed out, it's not 1980 any more. There's better way to transmit information from one person to another.