What a.... limited, I guess, viewpoint.

I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.

Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.

Parent poster is exactly the kind of person who argues that using tax dollars for school is wrong because they, personally, do not have kids. Because they can't realize that they indirectly benefit from it.

[delayed]

This would be a good argument if school actually made people smart. It doesn't.

Do you really think that the average intelligence/education level would be higher if we just didn't have schools?

Maybe you're an autodidact like many other engineers, and maybe you would have done better without schooling. Such people are a minority.

Like many, I think you're confusing "the school system is flawed" (it is) with "school bad."

It could though, right? Like let's assume vouchers lead to much better school outcomes. Those would still have to be funded by taxpayers.

Not a great argument to make considering that most western countries are seeing their PISA scores drop off a cliff recently.

If the schools in a given country were pumping out geniuses year after year then maybe you would have a point.

I agree. There are problems with the school system(s). Therefore, the concept of schooling is bad. We should just not have schools!

We (the public) have already been forced to accept that students' education is directly linked to the property taxes. In other words, students only deserve the education linked to an average the the worth of the community. Its some of the grossest discrimination against student, based purely on family and locality worth.

Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.

Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.

Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.

Your comment works great in a vacuum with no other inputs, but it doesn't hold up.

The unintended consequence of this is all the junk mail that makes regular mail a horrible experience to interact with.

Raise the prices , remove the spam.

I'm not describing a theory. I'm describing the world in which I live every day. It's much better for me, right now, in the real world, for the service to be cheap. Even though I've mailed nothing for at least the last year.

It's not better for me, so we cancel each other out?

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but the confounding fact is that the US mail is largely paid for by "bulk" mailers, they pre-sort and give to the post office in order saving the post office a lot of work at volume. If they didn't send lots of mail and pay for it, the system would be in a deep red ink crisis.

>The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.

When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.

The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)

Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.