Cite that that monopoly has been removed? Because you still cant sent a regular letter thru UPS and Fedex, they only send overnite letters like for $24.
Also note the Fedex and UPS have been funneling millions of $ to trump and the GOP.
The USPS has a monopoly on non urgent letters. 18 U.S. Code § 1696.
If a route can not be serviced profitably, the postal service should charge more or provide cheaper service. People who use a more expensive service should pay more.
Covid is not the only reason the post office is losing money. They lost 7.1 billion in 2019. Of that loss 3.4 billion did not happen because of prefunding retirement benefits. The reason according to the postmaster
“We continue to adjust to declining mail volume and remain focused on leveraging our unique and unrivaled network to gain new customers and grow profitable revenue in the increasingly competitive package business,” said Postmaster General and CEO Megan J. Brennan.
“However, revenue growth in our package business will never be enough to offset imbalances in the Postal Service’s business model, which must be addressed through legislative and regulatory reforms in order to secure a sustainable future,”
There are three ways forward, privatization, reform to allow cutting costs and increasing revenue, or congress writes them a check for 25 billion dollars and then an additional 5 billion every year.
The post office processes 19.7 million pieces of mail per hour. The small increase in mail volume due to mail in ballots will just be a small blip, maybe just 2 or three hours extra volume. No need to make huge changes to accomodate it.
Two or three extra hours of volume with the machines that were in place? Or two or three extra hours with the machines destroyed? And is that two or three extra hours of overtime, when overtime isn’t being permitted?
To be clear, your position is that despite needing reform for 20 years, that the reforms were so urgent they could not have waited until after an election in the middle of a pandemic?
Yes, there is a policy debate that is connected to this, but, to repeat (and restate) @BeepKillBeep’s question, if 46 states are getting letters warning about election mail not getting delivered quickly enough to meet election deadlines, is now the time to not only execute existing plans to dismantle letter-sorting machines at all, but also to speed it up, and also destroy the machines, and also eliminate overtime? Does that truly have no connection to the things Trump is saying about preventing Democrats from being able to expand vote-by-mail in response to Covid-19?
The president is refusing to provide a bailout to the post office. He also dislikes mail in voting. He likely conflated the two in his mind.
The USPS have been searching for a bailout for 15 years, it has nothing to do with the election and everything to do with their congressionally mandated business model.
The conspiracy theory is there is anything out of the ordinary going on because of the election. Some people have seized on the issue of mail in voting for the election to push for the 25 billion dollar bail out. I don’t know if Trump is one of the people who believes the conspiracy theory or if he just misspoke, he tends to believe conspiracy theories and frequently misspeaks.
The monopoly on delivering actual physical pieces of first class mail still exists - you can’t send those through UPS and Fedex, only urgent documents ( overnight or two day ) can be sent through those shippers.
But an absolutely huge amount of the first class may I used to get ( Christmas letters, birthday cards, bills, invitations ) comes via email or social media - and my responses no longer go first class mail either (bills get paid online or over the phone, invitations get responded to in the same way they were sent.
It’s less that the monopoly no longer exists than the fact that it doesn’t matter as much any more.
To be clear the USPS handles so much mail that 50 million or so ballots spread out over a month or two is not going to make any difference. There is no reason to change or stop the process of transitioning from mail to package delivery that has been going on for years.
Then, why is the post office warning it may not be able to deliver ballots on time?
(See? I provided another cite!)
Are they lying in order to discourage mail-in ballots?
Most first class mail takes 2-5 days to be delivered. Many states have rules that someone can request a ballot a day or two before the election. If someone requests a ballot two days before the election there is a not insignificant chance that they will not get there in time. 94% of mail arrives to its destination in 3 days. That means 6% of the people who request a ballot three days before the election will not receive their ballot in time to vote. That is why the Post Office is telling election officials to spread the word to request a ballot at least a week in advance to have the best chance of it getting there on time.
Can I cite it by email, or is email my cite?
There were quite a number of times since email came about that someone attempted to find a way to put a tax or stamp on them.
So mail that goes to urban centers can be delivered for half or a third the cost that it is for far flung rural areas?
Or just let it collapse, of course.
You may consider it to be within the last option, but a 4th option is to just turn it back into a normal federal agency. The postal service, and universal mail delivery, are hugely popular, including with large parts of the Republican base. There is little support for cutting services or shutting it down, and most people probably think it’s an ordinary federal agency anyway. Spinning it off made sense for the decades when they were making more money and we’re easily self-sustaining. Now, it doesn’t. They should just be put back on the regular books. But all that has nothing much to do with this discussion.
Do you have a cute for your claim about how minimal the delays will be? Because congresspeople are hearing from constituents saying they haven’t received mail for a week. The overtime rules mean that people who are out sick don’t have their routes covered. Mail that would normally be delivered by a worker going out again is allowed to accumulate. People are already seeing big changes, like the dead chicks example, and many others.
I hate when auto correct doesn’t work as intended. cute=cite, and we’re=were.
Ok. I just wanted to make sure I understood your position. I don’t want to be misrepresenting you or anything.
Ah, thanks.
Anecdotal, but:
I had to mail a couple of packages yesterday; so I was at the post office, and, as there wasn’t any line at the time, asked the person at the counter about the situation (cautiously trying to leave politics out of it.)
Report from a small town in upstate New York State:
The changes that were directly affecting that post office have been rescinded. There will now again be multiple runs of truck deliveries when this is necessary to move all the mail (which is common), and they’ll be allowed to deliver all of the day’s mail in that day. The local office is pretty much caught back up; the distribution center in Rochester, NY is still behind, but is gaining on the backlog which the new rules had produced, though there are still some packages which arrived there a week ago which haven’t yet gone any further than Rochester.
She didn’t know what’s happening with the sorting machines, because this office is too small to have that type of equipment; for this area that’s all up in Rochester.
There were very large problems caused during the time the changes in rules were in effect. Mail was piling up left over from the day before, which meant there was even more excess mail to deal with the next day, so the backlog kept getting larger and would have continued to do so as long as they tried to keep to those rule changes.
So, according to that source, the new rules were indeed causing major screw ups. And at least some of them have been rescinded. At least for now.
Yes, I mentioned that in my post. I was asking for a cite for puddleglum’s claim that delays relevant to the election would be minimal.
They do cherish their democracy; it’s other people who they think shouldn’t have any democracy. They want a political system run by the “right people”. So they’re not outraged at what Trump is doing; they like what he’s doing. They believe there are people who shouldn’t be allowed to vote and they support Republican efforts to stop those people from voting.
Ah, my mistake.