The Postal Service Deserves a Permanent Bailout | Hacker News Reader

The Postal Service Deserves a Permanent Bailout

nymag.com

62 pointserentz28 comments

I'm in favor of a bailout, but only if mail is substantially reworked to prevent the unbelievable flood of tree-killing paper spam I get deluged with.

It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings.

We need some way of imposing additional costs on mail marketing, such as required payments to people if mail arrives at their mailbox. It is mentally taxing to sift through crap mail searching for relevance.

The USPS also needs to establish some sort of official email for people with similar spam suppression requirements, so that legal or official government messaging has an appropriate destination besides "kill tree, send mail".

In the 1990s I worked on a USPS project, and the sheer size of bulk mail processing (aka junk mail) in facilities was probably 100x what the mail processing for personal letters was.

> It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings.

This is a direct function of the completely misguided (IMHO) idea that government services need to be sustainable only on usage fees. That's a failure of understanding what government is for and effectively a regressive tax. We need another mechanism for keeping the system efficient. Making it market-based isn't the only one.

That would be much less of a problem if bulk mailing rates were eliminated. As for the evils of government, I hesitate to even think about what the corporate solution to the coronavirus would look like.

Repeal the PAEA, pass a postal banking act, and fund the USPS with taxpayer dollars as is allowed by the Constitution. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I am all for bailing out USPS. But it won't be permanent. They'll have issues again, their very nature of being a government-operated institution guarantees that.

This is not the first time the USPS is in trouble. After the financial Panic of 1837, the USPS almost collapsed. Congress had to step in to help it, and by 1845 they gave USPS complete monopoly, which killed the more efficient and cheaper private mail delivery enterprises. See "America's First Great Depression" by Alasdair Roberts.

>They'll have issues again, their very nature of being a government-operated institution guarantees that.

By which you mean that bad actors in government repeatedly sabotage[0] an otherwise extraordinarily well-run and cheap service, right? It's a standard playbook from, ahem, a certain type of politician: sabotage a well-run service, then point to its failure as evidence that the concept of government is broken; privatize and profit.

The fact you had to go all the way back to 1837 (!) to find evidence of instability speaks volumes.

[0] The most relevant sabotage in this case is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (2006) which single-handedly destroyed the USPS's balance sheet. Seems rather unfair that the government gets to dictate how the Post Office spends money, but doesn't fund it at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Regulatory_Commission#P...

It hasn't been government-operated since 1970.

It’s an independent governmental agency under the executive branch. If the USPS isn’t “government operated”, then neither is the CIA, FCC, or Social Security Administration.

Great reply. That's exactly what I said. Fannie Mae isn't technically government-operated - but it's a government-sponsored enterprise.

That's just semantics. That's like saying Fannie Mae is not government operated. Yes, both are technically correct. Regardless, they are encumbered by government oversight. They are U.S. government-sponsored enterprises.

Not sure why someone downvoted me on this! Fannie Mae, USPS and many other institutions are government-related, government-sponsored businesses. They are not completely free like regular businesses to do as they wish to earn a profit. My comment was correct and relevant to this discussion.

The story really should have lead with “repeal the 2006 PAEA” which imposed funding requirements given to no other business:

https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...

The USPS would have been cash-flow positive for years had it not been deliberately sabotaged by Republicans seeking to privatize it.

In any business, when demand shrinks, the business has to also shrink. I don't understand the need to have 6 day/week delivery in modern times when there has been such a huge decline if mail volume. It seems to me they should have cut this down to 3 days a week, then 2, and I don't even think 1 day/week would be unreasonable for 1st class mail. But maybe that doesn't work logistically because they still have to store the mail they're not delivering (even though there isn't much of it).

Doing the package deliveries - I dunno. It seems like if there was a demand for this service, more competition would have sprung up for FedEx and UPS without the USPS needing to get involved. Then again, maybe the USPS is helping to keep shipping rates down. Hard to say what prices would be if the USPS hadn't gotten involved in package shipping, overnight delivery, etc.

I mean, it's not like the US would let the USPS fail, as that'd cause so many dependent businesses and services (if nothing else, the IRS and Census forms) to fail. Unless they plan on running a free internet line to everybody's house that can have messages jammed down it very cheaply, but that seems more expensive than keeping the USPS around.

If there's one thing the past 4 years should have shown you, it's that "sensible heads will prevail" is no longer a safe assumption to make about the US government. I'm not being glib - we are now faced with a situation where the people in charge of the government are actively dismantling its own institutions with no regard for knock-on effects. Don't catch yourself thinking "Surely they wouldn't $foo". They absolutely would $foo, and $bar too if they could get away with it.

Congress has been running the USPS into the ground for decades. Probably deliberately. Probably for purposes of privatization and profiteering.

How do you vote by mail (the most secure way to vote when one cannot vote in person) without the USPS?

Half of the people in power seems to think that (no votes by mail) is a bonus feature, not a bug...

UPS or Fedex, shockingly, can easily deliver envelopes!

Yes, because private companies with no legal requirement to deliver to every address should be handed power over our voting process on a silver platter.

But there are many places where Amazon, ups, and fedex, etc. depends on USPS for last mile delivery.

they can, but not with any kind of custody and integrity like the post office. postal employees are background checked and the process is monitored and audited to ensure the integrity of the mail system.

voting by mail is one thing that is too important to trust to a private, for profit business. so is waging war, and maintaining the public health.

Those don’t have a legal mandate to deliver to every address in the US.

The USPS doesn't deliver to every address in the US.

I lived in a place with an address but no USPS mail delivery. UPS and FedEx got there.

What are you advocating? Or was this just a baseless attempt at snide humor?

Can they simply offer a “no ads/no bulk mail” USPS+ option? $5/month? I’d be happy to pay it. It would save a lot of processing costs and trees too.

I’m not sure what they are making more than that off my mailbox per month now though.

We need to bail out the Postal Service so they can stop needing to make money on junk mail.

Props for the photo caption too

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