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Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget, it's a service. It doesn't lose money, it costs money. Otherwise please always say "lost" instead of "costs" for all military spendings, and all other government agencies.

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> Most of the quasi-confusion can be traced back to the 1971 Postal Reorganization Act, which eliminated the old Post Office Department, replacing it with the US Postal Service. The act was intended to make the USPS self-financing from its own revenues, and to make it an independent, non-political public service. Prior to the PRA, postmasters (including the postmaster general) were political appointees; rates were set by Congress, and the POD had to go through the appropriations process to get the money it needed to operate.

USPS is a special case of government services which is neither a traditional agency nor a government-owned corporation. Its got a weirdly specific charter that was carved out to protect private shipping companies- for example they cannot buy their own planes. They simultaneously have to deliver mail to all US addresses with uniform pricing 6 days/week AND be operate without tax dollars. I use the term loss here because that is what they use, for example in their annual report: https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2019...

https://postalnews.com/blog/2015/05/09/postal-myths-2-the-us...

What a boondoggle: the private shipping companies use the USPS to deliver to unprofitable routes as they have no such mandate. Imagine if NASA were similarly kneecapped to protect private space companies - it'd be awful.

Knowing our government you may have predicted a future reality.

NASA's been kneecapped by Congress, several presidential administrations, and itself for decades. If private space corporations like SpaceX eat NASA's lunch in the next decade or so, it'll be in spite, not because of them.

Maybe for the better - SpaceX, et al haven't incinerated any crew on the ground, blown up any crew during the ascent, nor burned up any crew in re-entry by ignoring their engineers in favor of their political appointees.

> Otherwise please always say "lost" instead of "costs" for all military spendings, and all other government agencies.

I think you might have reversed your suggestion?

No. They said the USPS lost x mil. Dollars. By the danke token, the military lost x tril. Dollars.

This was my cynical suggestions for a consistent terminology.

A service for advertisers and salespeople to put paper products in a special box I have in front of my house?

I agree with the sentiment but for all intents and purposes, pretty much any organ within a State is run like a for-profit corporation. Their "income" is taxation, fines, etc.

This doesn't sound right. It's a pretty big claim.

I suspect the claim is along the lines of stories like this https://news.usni.org/2021/09/22/navy-plans-to-cut-1000-civi..., where the U.S. Navy is working to fire 1,000 civilians due to budgetary pressure.

Even government agencies (even the military!) can't spend inordinately, they have to fit within a topline like private companies have to.

There are differences of course but there's a lot of similarity as well.

I believe the stark difference is, that a private company can spend what it earns, while the budget of government agencies or the military is basically arbitrary (committee-decided). Usually we would weigh agency spending against the value their service directly or indirectly provides. While a company's spending is weighed against its direct earnings.

incredibly simplified

Well, a private company can raise capital, so it can spend beyond what it earns, similarly to how the government budget can exceed tax receipts by issuance of debt and other methods.

The military budget is decided by a sort of committee (many of them, in fact, and not just Congress), but private companies all have ways of parceling out a budget as well, it's not as if most staff are literally paid out of their own personal direct sales. And the way that budget is decided almost invariably involves committees. The current DoD funding model was actually taken from what Ford Motor Co. used in the 60s.

When we were at risk of government shutdown earlier in the week, our office within the agency was relatively immune to the potential shutdown as our civilian staff are nearly all paid out of 'working capital' funds which are modeled after a direct earnings model, rather than being paid out of 'appropriated' funds which would have been at risk absent action from Congress.

i don't see how that's relevant

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