Congress has mandates 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.

>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 entirely new 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.

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?

New developments 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. 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 proportionally to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…

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

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.

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.)

Perhaps we are entering an era where it should be.

Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.

Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.

I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.

Should email be also run as a public service, not a business?

Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.

Not just email but internet as a whole should be run like a public utility, electricity as well. It's US centric to think everything needs to be private.

Nobody I knows wants a Federal government provided internet service.

However municipalities should be allowed to, not forced to [or not].

It is unfortunately not all that US centric. Privatization of essential services is widespread in the EU as well.