Are there some actual studies stating that privatized mail office would be cheaper/more efficient/better service? Or is this just attempt at money grab?
Also, the USPS has had potentially businesss-killing policies legislated into their finances by a hostile Congress, like requring pensions to be pre-funded seventy-five years in advance over a ten-year period.
That's not to say the Post Office is as efficient as it could be. But the services it offers (e.g., bank substitute in impoverished neighborhoods for check cashing/money orders, not to mention significant employer) are vital to American small businesses and communities.
I don't really know if any of this was a good move or not – I'm too young to remember the pre-privatisation era – but overall it seems to work reasonably well; certainly not as dysfunctional as the USPS seems to be. Either way, my point is that privatisation doesn't need to lead to the USPS refusing to serve difficult markets.
It's hard to imagine such intentionally bad management without some sort of motivation.
With respect, I don’t think that means what you think it means. We should work to remove ambiguity and threats to voting, not adding, and entrusting your ballot which is your most sacred right as an American citizen, to the Postal Service considering it’s history over the past 30 years, is far too dangerous for my taste.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/parsimon...
I encounter it almost exclusively in the context of statistical and machine learning.
Voting by mail has proven exceptionally safe with extensive modern use, and greatly increases the safety of elections and democratic participation. All claims to the contrary are based in partisan politics and have no data to back them up. You are sorely wrong and pushing a purely political agenda.
Privatizing government services is a money grab nearly 100% of the time.
1) They do not collect mail at houses or even street postboxes - you have to find a letterbox to drop your stamped letters, and those are less frequent than bus stops. My nearest two are about 400-500 meters away from my house in a neighborhood dense enough for an U-Bahn stop (and neither is at said U-Bahn stop). A good prompt for a walk for my able-bodied, middle-aged household, but hellaceously inconvenient for our 80+ year old neighbors.
2) A regular national letter is 0.80 EUR (US$0.94) in a country that does not have houses or small neighborhoods that are miles from anything else.
3) There are a few full service post offices that are also Postbank offices, but most parcel acceptance happens at shops that have DHL as a sideline. My city of 130,000 has two full service post offices, and one of them is only open 9:00-12:00 and 14:00-17:00 (and of course that's the one I have to pick up parcels that won't fit into the automated lockers at...)
Overall, privatized Deutsche Post is quite reliable, but its stability comes with trade-offs that the USPS is not allowed to make.
The public sector pension scandal is insane.
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...
> Although accounting rules require the postal service to calculate future liabilities, including those for projected future employees, the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees.
Asking individual agencies to save money for pensions just distorts monetary and fiscal policy.
When will people understand fractional reserve banking...
And it still results in devaluation of the dollar. You don’t get to pull resources from the future for free, especially if the expected economic growth doesn’t materialize.
We're talking about federal agencies.
> And it still results in devaluation of the dollar.
We could probably use more inflation, to be honest.
I would think that if such services were thought to be of federal powers, that many more bedrock services that are essential provide to all of society, such as internet service, would also be written in today if the founders had started in 2000.
RIP Lysander Spooner
They're prohibited by law from competing in regular mail delivery.