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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why it has to lose money at all in the first place. Sounds to me like they're offering a unique, highly in-demand service, in a market that is currently booming. Perhaps they should consider reworking their pricing structure? Just a thought.

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The reason is because in 2006, a law was passed that required the USPS to fully fund 75 years worth of expected retirement compensation. That's not reasonable, and was designed to destroy the service so it could be privatized.

Well that is the line we are always fed but it hasn't been true[0] since day one. In effect they are under similar rules to most private pensions in funding out to 25 years with requirements to project what their 75 year liability would be. Another view [1]

Simply put, the use of the Postal Service has dropped a lot but the number of employees retired or eligible to retire has not. In other words, they have so many eligible for full benefit retirements that they were not even trying to service the debt and instead likely to end up defaulting it to the PBGC which would have gutted payments and left retirees in a lurch.

So what would you have?

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/05/13/why-aoc-is-mo...

I don't get why public infrastructure and services are supposed to make a profit. They are already funded by taxes, why are we supposed to pay them again?

In this case, the USPS is not funded by taxes. It has a nightmarish duality of both getting no public funds and being controlled by congress.

Well that sounds like an aberration of neoliberalism. My point still stands though.

In an ideal world, healthy profits are just taxpayer money saved that can be re-invested or returned to the budget. In reality this never happens because there's an incentive to spend, spend and overspend.

USPS is not "funded by taxes". Or at least it's not designed to be. It's not a part of the government either.

It is an "establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States" specifically authorized by the United States constitution, and (if you ignore its transition from the USPOD) predates America.

The USPS does not have domain over the pricing structure of its most popular commodity: first class mail. That is regulated to the Postal Regulatory Commission. As for other services offered they do maintain control, which is why priority delivery starts at $7.15. They're also mandated to provide door-to-door delivery with first class mail, so effectively every piece of rural mail costs them money, but they can't do anything about it.

It's an idea that's past it's prime. Weekly delivery is all anyone needs, it's all junk mail anyway

Spoken like a cityfolk.

In the more rural parts, mail is very important. Cutting it down to 1/week is terrible.

It's simple to establish that rural delivery has a higher cost to the USPS than city delivery does. As you've pointed out, cutting delivery days to rural citizens also bears a high cost in the view of those with diminished service.

It seems the exceedingly sensible thing to do would simply be for the government to subsidize delivery to the costliest areas. Unfortunately that would mean taxpayer dollars supporting the USPS and that's an idea that's seemingly untenable to rural communities.

Hopefully a solution can be found in all of this. I certainly can't see one, but I'm hopeful that it'll find a way.

Maybe people in rural areas can pay for the value they're receiving?

Why is mail important? Are people sending letter? Or is that they're getting packages delivered? If it's packages they can have it delivered and actually pay the cost instead of asking other people to subsidize their lifestyle.

Depending on the type of mail the USPS has to publish rates 90 days in advance, and there are regulatory limits to increases.

Perhaps ease the limits then? What's the endgame here? Let it die? Keep spending tens of billions on it each year in perpetuity while it delivers packages for Amazon and Chinese overseas sellers for next to nothing? Neither is a good outcome for anyone, left or right.

>Keep spending tens of billions on it each year in perpetuity while it delivers packages for Amazon for next to nothing?

According to the Post Office they aren't delivering packages for next to nothing. They are delivering them for competitive rates and if they increased them they would lose business, revenue, and profit.

Now this could be temporarily different due to COVID-19, but if that's the case then emergency funding would be appropriate.

There's no such thing as "competitive rates" to a lot of the rural USA because nobody else is required to go there, so nobody does. Instead, they let the taxpayer fund those package deliveries while Bezos is swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck. You don't have to carry water for him just because he owns WaPo.

And to add insult to an injury, the mandatory service such as first class mail is priced below competitive and cemented that way by law. It's as though certain people in US Congress want the USPS to be insolvent, and ultimately nationalized / tax funded.

Their pricing structure is set by Congress, which has refused to allow them to do so.

Responding to the sibling comment: they don't need to make a profit, but they should at least break even. Call it a price, a tax, or whatever, but it's capable of being completely self-contained where those using the service can pay the full cost of operating it.

But what does "break even" even mean in the context of public infrastructure? If you're okay with calling that income a "tax" why doesn't public subsidy through... taxes count as breaking even? Nobody complains that highways don't "break even" but it's not like toll roads pay 100% of road upkeep...

Means that instead of paying for USPS with taxes or debts (and wasting half the money on unrelated bullshit in the process), it could just charge a sustainable price for its services.

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