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Comment by schoolornot | Hacker News Reader

I have not had a positive interaction with USPS in years. I don't understand why our taxes subsidize people to hand-deliver junk mail. What an inefficient use of taxpayer funds. With the exception of federal mail, why not jack the prices up tremendously? Stamps are 55 cents now per letter. Make them $1.50 and make everyone else rent a PO box or do digital scanning.

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Good news! The USPS is self-funded. Your taxes do not pay for subsidising people to hand-deliver junk mail.[0][1]

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/five-things/the-u-s-po...

[1] https://facts.usps.com/top-facts/

They deliver the junk mail because it keeps the economy of scale needed to deliver other mail. Ironically, it is subsidizing the tax payer.

I think I’d be ok with them charging a very expensive rate for junk mail. That’s not really the kind of traffic I’d regard as a public service so yeah, make as much profit as possible on it.

They’d probably be better off just charging people for the ability to opt out of junk mail.

> I have not had a positive interaction with USPS in years. I don't understand why our taxes subsidize people to hand-deliver junk mail.

They don't. Junk mail subsidizes everything else USPS delivers, and USPS is entirely self-funded.

In 2006, Congress passed a law which required the USPS to fund _75 years_ worth of employee pensions in advance. You wanna talk about taxes being wasted? Go look at Congress; they've been trying to kill the USPS for years.

I encourage you to read this whole article. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/wi...

Thank you for the interesting article. The comment about the pre-funding requirement removing their ability to make capital investments to improve infrastructure and systems was notable.

This pension-funding question comes up a lot, but I think it's a total distraction from the larger debate about the profitability of a public mail system. If we're debating whether, I dunno, a bake shop is a viable kind of business, the fact that the bake shop in question promised devastatingly large pensions to its employees decades ago is obviously an important fact about the state of that bake shop at this actual moment, but it does not tell us much about the general viability of bake shops, which is the thing actually being argued about.

It's like asking if a family can live on $50k a year but then stipulating that oh by the way in this family the father gambles 90% of his earnings away at the casino on payday. It doesn't really answer the question.

Why do people think taxes pay for the USPS?

Prices are controlled by congress because otherwise the union would use its monopoly to charge high prices and pay itself princely salaries.

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