I have followed the bickering over the U. S. Postal Service with some amusement over the last week and would like to make a few observations.
First, my wife and I avoid sending anything by U. S. Mail to the greatest degree possible. We have learned from painful experience that it cannot be depended on. That did not begin with Trump. It did not begin with Obama. It has been true for decades. You just need to search the newspaper archives for stories of retired mail carriers with tons of undelivered mail in their attics to understand part of the problem. Another component is that the schedules according to which mailboxes are serviced is aspirational rather than something upon which one can depend.
We will not pay bills by automatic checking account deduction for the simple reason that I know for a fact that very few companies follow their own security policies (how I know that is another story) and I don’t wish to publicize my checking account information. We will not bank online for similar reasons. Banks don’t even follow their own security policies.
I am completely convinced that handing a letter to the next passer-by heading more or less in the direction of your addressee with a request to pass it on to someone going in that direction is about as good as the USPS.
Second, I served for more than 20 years as an election judge for the City of Chicago. I have firsthand experience of how elections are tabulated. Fun fact: universal voting by mail provides a by-the-numbers method for engaging in voter suppression at a monumental level. I won’t go into the details here but it would be enormously easy. That would be more than enough to throw elections presently being decided by a percentage point one way or another which is a lot of them. It’s an extremely poor idea and pointing out absentee votes or that it works in Oregon is irrelevant. In Chicago precincts that didn’t vote for the regular Democratic candidate in the last election would magically have astonishingly low turnout.
Third, the USPS’s business model has been failing for decades. Email and online payment were its death knell and the rise of e-Commerce occasioned by the lockdowns of 2020 will be the final nail in its coffin. Once the USPS lost its fight for exclusivity against FedEx and UPS the fight was already lost. It won’t be saved with a bailout of $50 billion or one of $150 billion. It’s dead but the corpse is still twitching.
But I’ve got to give the Democrats credit. If they can pin the blame for the USPS’s decline or an election in doubt due to universal vote-by-mail on Trump, more power to them.
Finally, George Washington appointed his campaign manager (Ben Franklin) as the first Postmaster General of the United States. Complaints about politicizing the USPS are laughable. It was born politicized. In what world was it not politicized?
So, how do you pay your bills?
By check in person when we can. Credit card for a very small number of vendors. When there’s no choice other than a PO box, only then by mail.
That was a very informative post, Dave.
The entire USPS dust up has been another effort to create unnecessary partisan conflict in an era already over-amplified by too much partisan conflict. Like Dave said, the post office has been bleeding money and mismanaged for decades leading to a steady shrinkage of mail boxes. In 1985 there were 400,000 blue mail boxes around the country. By 2011 that number had been reduced to 160,000. During Obama’s term alone, 16,000 boxes disappeared from service. This has happened as snail mail was gradually being replaced by email, leading to boxes getting less than 25 pieces a mail, in a 6-8 week period of time, subject to remova.l Even those mail sorting machines have become obsolete and too costly to maintain, as they don’t handle packages – a portion of mail delivery that has increased, while letter type mailings are going south.
While hiring a Republican mega donor might not have the best optics, the fact that DeJoy has had a long business career in logistics seems to bring a skill set sorely missing in a bureaucracy always on the verge of insolvency. Furthermore, some of the cost-cutting measures were set by the board of governors this May, before DeJoy had even been installed in his position. The letter DeJoy sent out, causing so much Democrat contention, was meant as an “heads up†to States so they could get their VBM responsibilities in order before the election. However, this preliminary warning was distorted by the Dems, implying something malicious was afoot to upend the election, rather than the post office trying to diligently address potential glitches early. It’s as if there was no awareness how screwed up recent universal VBM exercises had been, where in one CD at least 20% of the ballots were not counted or invalidated.
Unlike Dave, I put no “good goingâ€:stars next to the democrat party for, once again, being so proficient at projecting blame onto Trump, intensifying the divisiveness between parties in order to gain some kind of twisted election advantage.
A shame about your post office. Our works pretty well. The people who work in the office are all friendly and helpful. (When we went on vacation last week they helped my wife fill out the hold the mail form.) The mail carriers on our route make it a point to bring stuff to the door if they think it is important or if is an extra large batch of mail and they dont want us to lose it. Dont think we have ever had anything lost. Got my son’s passport at the local post office and it was very easy and quick. We are pretty small town/rural so maybe it is different out here.
If the USPS goes away, I would expect to pay a lot more with not much difference in service. They lose so much money because Congress sets rules that make that happen. Of course if they let them charge enough to break even we would also pay more. Our FedEx and UPS experiences have hardly been perfect so not sure service would be any better. (The DMV people around here are fast, efficient and friendly also.)
“Email and online payment were its death knell and the rise of e-Commerce occasioned by the lockdowns of 2020 will be the final nail in its coffin.”
I agree I think, but not yet. Leave the big city. Lots of people are still dependent upon the postal service. You could make the argument that we should stop subsidizing rural life, but we would have a hard doing that.
Steve
OT- I keep seeing the word Marxist all of the time now. Generally being used by people who never read Marx and have no idea what it means but I think they are just using it as a pejorative anyway. So why the change from socialist to Marxist? Why not go straight to communist?
Steve
‘I keep seeing the word Marxist all of the time now. Generally being used by people who never read Marx and have no idea what it means’
Including a lot of people in this country who claim to be Marxist. I doubt there’s more than a couple thousand people in this country who’ve actually plowed through the entirety of Das Kapital. I tried but gave up. Long on rhetoric and assertions but short on facts. Not surprising from a man who never did a lick of work in his life and leeched off others.
My interpretation of Das Kapital was that it was the culmination of a German Romantic trend called “natural philosophy” or “Goethean science” of which, of course, Goethe was the primary exponent. A little observation and a lot of speculation. Very few people read any of it any more.
Most mathematicians have never read Euclid or Newton and other than economic historians most economists have never read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or John Maynard Keynes. It doesn’t seem to be a barrier to using their ideas and approaches.
Perfect.
I might add that I think that “Marxist” is presently being used in a folk sense to mean redistributionist policies or maybe just central planning. In reality nowadays practically everybody believes in redistributionist policies (example: you can’t support a modern military without redistributionist policies).
The most recent Vox Podcast called “the Weeds” had a really good history of the USPS and had a surprisingly rational take on the moral freakout by some on the left.
One interpetation I have read is that it’s battlespace preparation for a challenge to the legitimacy of the election in the case of a Trump victory.
Okay, so I listened to the podcast. It was a little informative but it suffered from a problem common at Vox.com: they don’t really know how things actually work. I have a bit more knowledge about the actual mechanics of post offices because I was tangentially involved with the modernization of the USPS operations that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I don’t think that MY would be quite as enthusiastic as he sounds about restoring the USPS to a public service if he realized the direction in which the subsidies flow. Third class mail (advertisements) don’t subsidize first class mail. It’s the other way around. First class mail subsidizes third class mail and package delivery. It’s bizarre but that’s the way it works. If the USPS raised its prices for third class mail, it would stop. That means we’re subsidizing big companies (like Amazon).
They also don’t understand the strategy of the USPS. It hasn’t been about service for decades if it ever was. It’s about market share. They’re desperately trying to maintain market share—in my view a doomed idea.
Solving the problem of rural delivery is actually pretty easy. It would be cheaper to pay FedEx and UPS to do it than it would be to maintain the USPS. The real issue is how in the heck the USPS can pay the pensions of all of the present and former employees which is why the Congress is requiring the USPS to prefund its pension system.
“most economists have never read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or John Maynard Keynes. It doesn’t seem to be a barrier to using their ideas and approaches.”
Sure, but then they have probably read people who’ve made good faith efforts to interpret them. It is difficult reading.
I think this is just perceived as a harsher word to use than socialist. They stop short of communist because of McCarthy but I expect that to take over soon. So socialist and Marxist when used by those in the right is close to meaningless other than it is something they dont like.
Steve
I think it’s more likely they’re relying on third hand sources.
A book just caught my attention by Paul kengor —-> “The Devil And Karl Marx.†Sounds like an interesting read.