The U. S. Post Office is experiencing significant losses which it blames on the recession and plans to respond with rate increases and a package of other changes:
The Postal Service experienced a 13 percent drop in mail volume last fiscal year, more than double any previous decline, and lost $3.8 billion. The projections anticipate steeper drops in mail volume and revenue over the next 10 years, and mounting labor costs only complicate the agency’s path to firm fiscal footing.
In an effort to offset some of the losses, Potter seeks more flexibility in the coming year to set delivery schedules, prices and labor costs. The changes could mean an end to Saturday deliveries, longer delivery times for letters and packages, higher postage-stamp prices that exceed the rate of inflation, and the potential for future layoffs.
I think it’s time to consider not merely abolishing the Post Office’s monopoly on first and third class mail but eliminating it altogether. There’s a host of good justifications for doing so including that the reasons that supported its existence for two centuries have largely evaporated and it’s inefficient compared with its competitors. Just not a good use of resources.
I don’t know about the rest of you but nowadays nearly all of my mail consists of catalogs, advertising materials, and other junk mail. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total amount of junk mail that I receive amounted to fifty pounds a week or more. Multiply that times 120 million households in the United States and you’re talking, probably, three million tons of junk mail delivered a week. How much of it would simply cease to exist without third class mail?
If the rationale for preserving the Post Office is to enable the poor to pay their bills and communicate with businesses, other people, and the government, aren’t there much better ways for doing that? Today even the poor have telephones or own home computers, videogame consoles, or cellphones. Dump the Post Office and set up a new agency to implement different ways of paying bills or communicating.
I’ll close with the peroration from a vintage Cato Institute diatribe against the postal monopoly:
At what point will the Postal Service lose its moral right to a monopoly? When no one can have mail delivered at home? When all the mail, not just 40 percent or 50 percent of it, takes two days or more to cross Washington? When the postal workers are paid three times as much as comparable private workers and waste four hours a day, instead of only an hour and a half? How bad do things have to get before we abandon the status quo? Does the United States really need to rely on a system that is suffering from a permanent work slowdown?
In the areas where the Postal Service faces competition, it is getting clobbered. In the areas where the Postal Service does not face competition, it is clobbering its customers. Maybe there is a lesson here.
Uh, er……..so we are talking about additional government intervention into health care why?
Let’s see now….Social Security…that’s working out great, well, actually…no, but what’s another tax hike??… how about Medicare – ouch!! – nevermind…um, the DMV? No, War on Poverty? The Pentagon? What about the roads, the wonderful roads, that’s it!! Uhhhh, damned potholes…. How about the Department of Agriculture!? Well, maybe not…..
I’m sure I can find a wonderful, efficacious government program……..um, but I need to get back to ya on that…
The Post Office does three things that must be retained even were it to entirely be abolished: addressing, rural post delivery and universal delivery.
It’s not commonly appreciated, but the USPS has functioned to standardize addresses across the United States. This has numerous benefits, like being able to find destinations in a strange place, and ensuring that everyone agrees what it means when a certain place is named by address.
Rural post delivery is simply not cost effective. Addresses are far apart, and often an address will be one of only a few at the end of a long access way with no addresses along the way. It is not uncommon for it to be difficult to get to the nearest post office. As a result, it is not likely that rural delivery would exist without the post office, but coming to the nearest town to get mail is also often not a good solution.
Today, mail dropped into any mailbox goes to any destination. If we are going to eliminate the post office, then it is easy to see how pickup would work: like a trash service, you’d just contract a pickup service. But how would delivery work? Would mail service A only deliver to its customers, and if so, how would you transfer mail between services, and whom would you hold responsible when things went wrong?
If we’re going to eliminate the post office, we have to address those three issues. On the other hand, I see no reason not to allow competition wherever FedEx, et al, wish to compete, so long as they must universally deliver. This would mean we’d have to subsidize rural delivery by the USPS even more than we do now, but I suspect that would still be cheaper than the way it runs now.
Jeff –
“On the other hand, I see no reason not to allow competition wherever FedEx, et al, wish to compete, so long as they must universally deliver. This would mean we’d have to subsidize rural delivery by the USPS even more than we do now, but I suspect that would still be cheaper than the way it runs now.”
Tell me you are kidding. You are making the classic argument: if private enterprise won’t do it, the government must. Or we subsidize in some form.
I must strongly disagree. You correctly point out the differences in economics of mail service in urban vs rural settings, but it does not follow that FedEx must service everyone. Or that prices must be equal.
Rural areas don’t have a Morton’s Steakhouse in every town. Nor do they have a Sachs Fith Ave. Should we mandate that every po-dunk town have these services? Should the government (taxpayers) be running/subsidizing steak houses and clothing stores in Butt-Fork N. Dakota?? Of course not. There are voluntary tradeoffs that people who live in different communities make. Why should the postal service be any different?
A person living in downtown Chicago gets great mail service; but they pay through the nose on property taxes and rents, or home prices, etc. Yet they should subsidize the guy in Corntown IL, who pays much less in home price or property taxes, for his/her postal service?
Its ludicrous on its face. Are you willing to propose that in return for subsidized rural postal service, the Corntown guy subsidize Chicago residents for high rents?? Please.
You know who loved the U.S. postal service? Tocqueville, that’s who. Paging Steve Verdon.
US Census bureau reports that 31.3 % of households lack internet access as of October of 2009. I think we have a penetration problem for not only the poor, but the elderly and rural citizens.
One additional problem is in the area of official documents. Delivering a pre-postage-paid envelope to the U.S. postal service is tantamount to delivering it to the government, even if it gets lost. AFAIK government agencies and courts don’t extend the same principles to private carriers because (a) most of the fine print on the packages suggests there is no real obligation to deliver the package, and (b) since there is no licensing authority establishing minimal standards for delivery. These are probably all fixable problems, but suggest to me that a licensing regime would need to be introduced to guarantee access and standards, including compliance with civil rights standards that probably aren’t currently applicable to private carriers.
I’d just assume stop Saturday delivery, and reduce house delivery in rural areas. I have good postal service my area, but I’ve lived where it wasn’t so good.
I may be news to Jeff Metcalf, but there are places where the USPS does not deliver first-class mail to a home mail box but where UPS and Fedex deliver to the front door, like Crested Butte, CO where I have a home.
All this postal service scapegoating is over-the-top. Lots of fine businesses run a deficit in bad times, why should the post office be any different? Since it is equally bad for it to run a profit (even for cushion in the bad times) and is expected to cover everyone, more than the average amount of inefficiency is a given. That said, we could improve it by 1) defined contribution pensions and 2) pay for performance instead of or alongside seniority. Labor costs are out of whack in the Post office, but they don’t have to be. If it were totally gone I wouldn’t miss it, but then I’m not a poor rural grandma who cant figure out those internets tubes. To re-make the point in the last post, instead of blanket whining about “big government”, how about focusing on things everyone agrees with that have a possibility of being fixed – like outrageous government labor costs. In reality, “small government” will mean only the most entrenched, least productive for the price, “hangin’ on til my pension” people will remain.
Wait.. you guys actually TRUST the internet to make payments on your regular bills?
Legal protections for payments by check are much more encompassing and consumer friendly. Identify theft in the check area is much more rare than that of credit cards. The mail is also much more secure that the internet.
Take a look at the laughable legal protections you have in case of error, theft, or fraud in electronic transactions and you won’t be so quick to use electronic payments.
I don’t trust electronic transactions; printed checks for me.
We still have a post office?
PD,
If you ever make a mistake will you stop posting completely?
We still need a post office in my opinion though there is certainly a lot of room for reform.
C’mon, PD, you must mean he liked the Pony Express. That’s just silly. I assume it was tongue in cheek.
I strongly endorse this point of view. In fact, I think it should be made part of the GOP platform. We’ll call it the Ditch The Hicks plan.
Frankly I think we should begin demanding that any person running as a “conservative” immediately take the Ditch The Hicks pledge.
It’s simple, people: either move to the city or you don’t get your social security check delivered anymore. Where’s Senator Bunning? Let’s get him in on this.
Wait! I’ve just had a stroke of genius!
If it’s more expensive to extend postal service to rural areas, it follows that census taking is equally unsupportable. So we don’t send census workers to your Dakotas, your Wyomings, your Alaskas. The hicks simply disappear. Poof! Thus solving the problem of the postal service and raising the ambient IQ of the Congress all in one fell swoop.
Seriously, you people should be paying me for these ideas.
Steve, please don’t make me post emoticons when I kid. I thought it was funny that after a post in which you had a lengthy comment from Tocqueville, Dave posted on abolishing the Post Office, one of the institutions he greatly admired.
OT- (You need an email address Dave.) Would appreciate your thoughts on the Mahar piece. Though it is close, I dont know that much about Maryland. Need to read up.
http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2010/02/massachusetts-problem-and-marylands-solution-we-dont-have-to-wait-for-washington-part-2-.html
Steve
I strongly endorse this point of view. In fact, I think it should be made part of the GOP platform. We’ll call it the Ditch The Hicks plan.
“Frankly I think we should begin demanding that any person running as a “conservative†immediately take the Ditch The Hicks pledge.
It’s simple, people: either move to the city or you don’t get your social security check delivered anymore. Where’s Senator Bunning? Let’s get him in on this.”
Dumb.
“Wait! I’ve just had a stroke of genius!
If it’s more expensive to extend postal service to rural areas, it follows that census taking is equally unsupportable. So we don’t send census workers to your Dakotas, your Wyomings, your Alaskas. The hicks simply disappear. Poof! Thus solving the problem of the postal service and raising the ambient IQ of the Congress all in one fell swoop.
Seriously, you people should be paying me for these ideas.”
And dumber. The creative genious seems to be missing.
I dunno, maybe I do have a future in stand up,,,,,,
@Drew
What do your small business clients think of this one?
Drew,
The difference between postal service and a Morton’s or a Sach’s is that we require certain business be done with the government, and that some of it be done by mail. If the government requires that form, then it must ensure that the capacity to use that form is provided. I do not, for instance, favor the rural phone subsidies (even though I wouldn’t be able to talk to my father on the phone without them) because the government makes no requirement to do business with it by phone.
malthus,
Yup, that’s news to me. How do they do it, then, and why? Not that it necessarily affects my argument, which is that some means of easy postal access must be provided in rural areas, but it might. If the post office is not doing that now, in some form, then they should be. I am aware of the problems of mail delivery in rural Alaska, particularly during the winter. There’s only so much you can do in such cases. But as a general rule, my point, I think, stands.
No its simply convienent and cheaper. You could purchase all the of the same services via private companies.
I’m going to assume by form you mean some sort of document…if that is the case, go pick it up somewhere nearby. You have a vehicle. If you don’t want to do that, then have a private company deliver it. And today I imagine many forms could be printed from websites. Yeah, not everyone will have an internet connection or a printer, but if you do, start a business. Print out a bunch and charge people for them.
Steve, I think you misunderstood my point, which likely means I worded it badly. Government requires us to use a certain form of communications, the physical submission of certain documents, for some government business. To the extent that the government requires us to use a form of communications to do business with the government, it must provide a means for everyone to do so. Otherwise, some people are deprived of their ability to interact with the government, which should be available to all. If the government wants us all to use carrier pigeons to file taxes, it has to provide everyone with a way to get the use of carrier pigeons.
In short, the government cannot simultaneously require us to do a thing, and then not provide us with the ability to do that thing in some reasonable way that any normally competent adult can use.
This even applies, in my opinion, to such things as writing laws. If the laws are not written in language that high school graduates can reasonably be expected to understand, and if they are not few enough that high school graduates can reasonably be expected to read them without going to law school, then the laws are prima facie unjust, because ignorantia legis neminem excusat only works when it’s possible to overcome one’s ignorance of the law.
I agree with you that the postal service should not have a monopoly. I disagree with abolishing the postal service, unless we at the same time or prior either provide other methods for people to transact their business with the government, or maintain at least sufficient capability to serve the purpose of transacting that business.
Jeff,
In Crested Butte and, for all I know, in nearby Aspen as well, anybody who wants to receive first-class mail has to pay to maintain a PO Box at his extra expense. Water there is abundant, but we now have to pay a boatload to the city for it.
I’m all for contracting out just about everything the government pretends to do, including mail delivery, water & energy supply, garbage collection and, most importantly, primary and secondary education. Someday soon, I hope, our socialist gummint will run out of other people’s money.
Or they may continue down the socialist path, taking up such projects as nurturing our children, building us houses and cars, delivering proper food, finding us mates and sex partners, and selecting our beer and wine brands and our religions.
All I can do now is wait and keep a valid passport, various visas and a plane ticket out.
Yeah, malthus, but where would we go? Maybe Switzerland, but even that’s pretty iffy, even if they could physically take in the conservatives and the libertarians.
Jeff,
Try Hong Kong, New Zealand, Antartica, Saudi Arabia, Chile and even Brazil. And check out Patri Friedman’s project. There are loads of other good alternatives for us nuclear physicists.
I fail to see Saudi Arabia or Hong Kong offering more freedom than the US any time soon. (And not being a nuclear physicist, I couldn’t bargain for the freedom, either.)
Yes get rid of the post offfice, then we can get rid of everything. things like, congress and senate, they dont do us no good, all they do is not do there jobs and then tell us it is the other parties fault. No the fault belongs to both parties. I truly believe that we should not have parties, let each candiate run by themselves, if they dont do what they said in the first year, kick them out and get a new president, that way we are assured of no games being played by the candiates