¹ The retiree funding requirement was only changed recently when Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law.

That's the narrative, but this was always a blatant bid to destroy the USPS. There's simply no other explanation.

Sure there are, they just don't get the air time and political attention. Examples I'm familiar with: The minerals, oil, and gas regulatory agencies bring in billions of dollars. A single lease sale in the gulf would make BOEM as an agency incredibly profitable but instead the money just goes up to the federal government and is redistributed. National Parks already collect entry fees and the NPS could easily raise those prices to meet or exceed agency expenses, public demand would almost certainly pay it, and they could also teeter like the USPS. Social Security, if it were never fucked with, would have more money from just interest than most country's GDPs but we've robbed that piggy bank numerous times already.

There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.

It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping

> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

USPS don't -- they simply forward from HongKongPost or ChinaPost. If the local post office in HK or CN does not cooperation, they can't do anything.

>"In our view, the USPS would require some time to sort out how to execute the new taxes before allowing Chinese packages to arrive in the U.S. again," said Chelsey Tam, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar.

> The Trump administration this week imposed a 10% tariff on all goods from China and banned all low-value, e-commerce parcels from receiving duty-free benefits under the de minimis entry program. The administration said the emergency order is part of its strategy to stop the illegal shipment of fentanyl and precursor chemicals into the United States."

Lol said out of their mouth while he was pardoning the head of the Silk Road underground/darkweb drug distribution organization to pump his crypto.

- Marco Rubio's first day trip ao Australia to address AUKUS, which is containment for China

- Marco Rubio's trip to Panama, and subsequent Panama's quitting of China's one belt and road and investigation into Chinese ownership inside Panama Canal

- Trump's 10% tariff on China, and 25% tariff on Mexico (basically targeting Chinese manufacturers in Mexico)

- Trump's threat of sanctions and tariffs on Russia, which China is allied with on invading Europe

- Israel/Hamas ceasefire, allowing US to focus more on China

China is fucked. That's why Xi Jing Ping is so quiet these days, having to deal with lack of cooperations from Chinese military, deflation, mounting debt, and now full court economic attack from US. Wait until congress removes China's most preferred nation status and instant 60% tariff increase.

And one of the only hold-outs in South America is Colombia - a country Trump has already had a fight with. And with Trump's erratic tariff policies, I would imagine this trend would continue or accelerate.

[1] There's a few versions. here's one: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1ibunc1/latin_amer...

Trump is basically dismantling the world-leading US’s influence and handing it over to China on a silver platter.

As well as their solar panels.

And the US might still be the biggest consumer market in the world right now, but margins are thin and a lot of companies have spent the last few months preparing for Trump's whims.

Also, you're completely ignoring his most important point, which is that even allies now think of the US as unreliable. As an ally, as a trading parter and as a market. Trump is 100% destroying very important international relations and China is the country that will profit the most.

That vehicles make up 4% of their exports in 2024 is already telling because it was 0% only a few years ago. None of the clean tech was there a few years ago, they had no leadership in AI a few years ago, they weren’t producing fully mobile robots a few years ago. If you think they are stuck just because I’d a moribund real estate market and a demographic decline, well, I don’t see how that is even possible at this point.

Trump sh*tting on allies and enemies alike is more in china’s favor than the consumption they lose from the states. Even Mexico and Canada could get tired of the USA and just go full in with China if Trump pushes them too hard.

I am not sure about this one. Trump is pushing the rest of world to take side.

Panama, as displeased as it can be, choose to end the belt-and-road thing.

> China can replace them with internal consumption and developing world markets that are rapidly growing.

internal consumption: They tried. and kind of failed.

developing world markets: They are winning on this one, agreed.

Add that https://www.businessinsider.com/who-was-elon-musk-grandfathe... and you see who is actually leading today USA.

China will encounter economic headwinds, yes.

However china has a functioning and fairly flexible executive that is capable of making long term plans and executing them (see belt and road, debt trapping most of africa's ports and mines).

The US has a completely non-functioning legislature and an executive that is not in control of the president. The Executive does not have a plan past personal power grabs. When the president realises that he's been locked out of the mechanisms that control the executive, then all bets are off.

These ePackets are then bundled up into big sacks that are basically not inspected at all at US international mail facilities due to the de minimis exemption, which was just rolled back. The special status granted to ePackets meant that the volume shipped grew far beyond the processing capacity for normal packages at US IMFs. This pause (and subsequent unpause) from USPS on packages from China is because they don’t know how they’re going to handle that volume if it isn’t given special status.

Source: I worked on a project adjacent to this a couple of years ago. Close enough to pick up the basics but this isn’t quite what I was working on, so take my comment with a grain of salt.