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Comment by 8bitsrule | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this works out well (the P.O. could use the income) and puts an end to the careers of the check-cashing sharks.

This piece from 2013 [https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do-with-a-po...] showed up on HN just over a year ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911696]

Edit: quote from Brown:

"Postal banking systems are also ubiquitous in other countries, where their long record of safe and profitable public banking has proved the viability of the model.... The leader today is Japan Post Bank (JPB), now the largest depository bank in the world.... Rather than using its deposits to back commercial loans as most banks do, Japan Post invests them in government securities."

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The stereotype of check cashing places as loan-shark-esque is generally wrong - I recommend reading The Unbanking of America by Lisa Servon to get a real understanding of the industry.

For a poor person, a check-cashing place is generally the cheapest and most straightforward way to cash checks (and receive other basic financial services) with clear, reasonable pricing. If you're poor, acquiring the same services from a bank is not only vastly more expensive, it's also much less transparent in terms of how and when fees will be assessed.

Often this confusion stems from people who aren't that familiar thinking they're the same as payday loan places, which are just legal loan sharks and designed to trap people in an endless cycle of debt.

None of this is anything against postal banking, which I'm hugely supportive of.

> For a poor person, a check-cashing place is generally the cheapest and most straightforward way to cash checks

That's the problem, though. It doesn't matter how good or bad their service is because their business model should not exist.

That's a problem, but it in no way makes them sharks as the post that I was responding to said. There is a structural issue in banking, and they arose to fill a need that results from that structural issue. They do so in a fair and transparent way at reasonable prices, though, so it's unfair to describe them in predatory terms. The fact is that poor people are better off because they exist.

I think it's very far from clear that the Japan Post Bank example is a purely positive story.

JPB was for much of its history not subject to the same financial oversight through the FSA that other banks were; instead benefiting from a laxer regime under a different regulator and then subsequently from a separate supervision office within the FSA.

This unusual regulatory position is not limited to oversight. Up until 2011, JPB was not even required to pay into the Japanese deposit insurance system and is allowed to offer higher deposit limits than commercial banks. Japan Post Holdings continues to benefit from a unique position of being allowed to own both a bank (JPB) and an insurance company (JPI).

The investment policies of JPB and JPI directly subsidize Japanese government debt (which is ... not a great asset, rated A+ by S&P and on a worsening trajectory of outlook) in preference to performing the fundamental job of banks elsewhere and lending money to private enterprise.

> the P.O. could use the income

The P.O. is a service, it doesn't have need of income.

Does the Department of Defence need income? Does Social Security need income? Does the EPA need income?

No, because they're services, not for-profit businesses.

Yes and no. I don't have to buy missiles from the DoD like I do stamps. It's a service but it's some weird quasi-governmental-business

It's not unique in that respect. National parks, TSA precheck, and every version of the DMV are selling goods and services back to the public that bought them into existence.

>The P.O. is a service, it doesn't have need of income.

no but it needs funding, has the funding been good over the last few decades?

"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber."

us army funded drug, enzalutamide, is saving my life right now. i haven't really reserached why they funded that drug but was suprised to learn that.

Education related spending in the US is at its highest ever level as a percentage of GDP. Defense spending has been going down on a GDP basis for decades.

If I pay you less than what you need by 1000 dollars every month, but then raise your pay by 200 dollars, your pay "is at the highest ever level". Conversely, if I overpay you by 1000 dollars every month but make you take a 2 cent pay cut every year, my spending on you "will be going down for decades".

Ratios are great except when they obscure what problem they're supposed to address.

Aggregate US educational spending across federal, state, and local governments has been higher than DoD (plus DoE) spending for as long as I can remember.

“Quote are make you feel good but don’t prove anything” -Ghandi

Our schools (probably) have all the money they need.

They have the wrong set of policies and practices in many cases, but “more money” is a simpler thing to ask for that specific improvements to educational practices.

Americans seems to have an aversion to your idea. Clearly, if it doesn’t make a profit, a private company would provide a better service at lower cost.

The assumption in this statement is staggering.

If public Company A has costs greater than revenue and is therefore losing money, private Company B will therefore (?) be able to provide a better service at lower cost? On what basis?

There is no private company today that does what the USPS does. It's easy to forget while living in the metro areas most of us live in, but Fedex, UPS, and DHL often contract out to deliver to rural addresses, because they don't offer universal delivery. The contract out to the USPS, which does because it's required to.

So no, I absolutely dispute that a private company would or could provide a better service than the USPS at lower cost. The USPS would be fine if not repeatedly and continually hamstrung by Congress, and no competitor comes close even so.

I mean, have you compared prices recently? Today, right now, private companies are providing arguably worse services (again, more limited delivery area) at higher cost[0].

0. https://goshippo.com/blog/which-is-cheaper-usps-vs-ups-vs-fe...

We agree; however, the efficiency of private industry over the bloated lassitude of public services is an article of faith among many.

The Post Office has a requirement to be self-funding and also has been saddled with a ridiculous pre-funding requirement for retiree health care that applies to no other entity.

Both of these could be eliminated by congress, but there doesn't seem to be the will (and in fact, there is an ideological faction in congress that would eliminate the postal service or privatize it for their donors' benefit if they could).

By pre-funding, you mean funding. They are required to pay today for the liabilities they incur today (the promises of future healthcare). Today's liabilities (the promises) have a very real cost. Ignoring that cost elsewhere is it's own hazard. Adopting pay-as-you-go might work for governments which can loot people later or just unilaterally change the rules. Or it might work for a company while things are good, but is catastrophic when it goes bad. Actually funding things is the proper way to do it.

It's the level of prefunding that's excessive. They need to fund retirement benefits for employees who have not yet been hired. https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume

> As things stand now, retiree healthcare, pensions, and workers’ compensation are unfunded by about $86.6 billion.

USPS pensions etc. were extremely underfunded for a long time. The size, scope, and quasi-governmental nature of USPS meant that ignoring the problem was more likely to involve a bailout than responsible operations.

IMO, the only unreasonable pension expectation levied on USPS is that for veterans: They’re required to pay some amount of veteran retirement benefits for some reason that I haven’t been able to make sense of.

Again, putting aside money to meet the obligations you will incur for having an employee today is funding. It is not prefunding by any stretch.

I haven't seen any mention of setting aside money for people who don't work there yet, including in your link.

Asking to be treated like the government so that you can hire someone now, with promises of future payments, then pull in those payments based upon the revenue produced by future employees is analogous to a ponzi scheme. The federal government gets away with pay-as-you-go because they can set taxes, devalue money, change payment plans, etc...

How much the government should be investing in providing a quality mail system is a different discussion entirely. But this discussion is basically "should pensions be funded or not". Calling it prefunding is a rhetorical device only, and doesn't stand up to actuarial scrutiny.

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