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Comment by seo-speedwagon | Hacker News Reader

Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

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And forgo the revenue? Or, do the other carriers do a better job of meeting the imposts?

It’s a govt service, they are not trying to meet wall street quarterly shareholder expectations

It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point. It started in 1970 with the Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed it from a government department to an independent government entity that was expected to fund its operations entirely through its own revenue. Then in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the PAEA which required the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits seventy-five years into the future¹. Congress even restricted the USPS's ability to set its own rates, expand its services or close unprofitable locations without political interference.

¹ The retiree funding requirement was only changed recently when Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law.

> It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point.

That's the narrative, but this was always a blatant bid to destroy the USPS. There's simply no other explanation.

USPS does more or less teeter on the edge of solvent and sustainable depending on how you measure and when you measure. All things considered, I think that's pretty damn good. Pretty much no other government service can claim that. I think the retiree funding requirement is/was dumb and an unnecessary handicap but the way USPS runs itself should be a model for other government services. The only reason we don't look at USPS as a massive success is because the idiot left brains want it to be run like a charity and the idiot right brains want it gone entirely.

> Pretty much no other government service can claim that.

Sure there are, they just don't get the air time and political attention. Examples I'm familiar with: The minerals, oil, and gas regulatory agencies bring in billions of dollars. A single lease sale in the gulf would make BOEM as an agency incredibly profitable but instead the money just goes up to the federal government and is redistributed. National Parks already collect entry fees and the NPS could easily raise those prices to meet or exceed agency expenses, public demand would almost certainly pay it, and they could also teeter like the USPS. Social Security, if it were never fucked with, would have more money from just interest than most country's GDPs but we've robbed that piggy bank numerous times already.

> And forgo the revenue?

There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.

It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping

Sorry I responded to a comment which mentioned duty assessment. If this UPU/international postal union settlement rate stuff, that's not duty, it's a global model for cost reconciliation.

> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

Doing an inspection is going to take a moderately well paid government employee a little bit of their time. I'd be very, very surprised if the cost of their labor is less, in expectation, than the tariff collected on the average de minimus shipment from China.

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