Check out DeJoy being grilled by the Democratic Senator from Nevada. The guy is a lying sack of shit, just like his boss. And dumb as a brick, too (just like his boss).
What does a tax on email have to do with this? 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.
I saw a little of that hearing live and a couple of clips.
I kind of liked the fact that the guy at least answered a couple of grandstanding “yes-or-no, will you…” questions with “No.” Questioners don’t know how to deal with that, lol.
Before email, I could not send a letter to someone across the country without involving the USPS. (or for overnight, which is a relatively recent thing, which has been discussed. It also used to be very frowned upon to put a letter in with a parcel sent with UPS. There are also courier services and other options.)
With email. I can.
That is the monopoly that has been broken. I’m not sure what else there is to argue here.
The point of talking about a tax on email was specifically because the USPS didn’t want that monopoly broken.
When the lying sack of shit claimed that his dismantling of the post office was done according to an “analysis” that claimed it would more efficient, I hardly think it was “grandstanding” to ask him for a copy of that analysis. And refusing to do so hardly helped his case.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with the USPS monopoly on regular first class mail.
You might as well say “My frog croaks nicely, but too much.” That would be just as on point about the subject.
The only argument that the post office needs reform is based on the idea it is a business and needs to be profitable. But it doesn’t. It’s a government service, explicitly cited in the constitution.
The only reason it doesn’t have a surplus (not a profit) is a very clearly disingenuous law that force them to fund retirement for 70 years worth of people. They’d have enough money if not for that law.
Claiming the post office needs reform is just a setup from conservatives after they intentionally crippled it so it would look like it couldn’t function. And, even then, it was often still much more efficient than the paid services. So someone had to go in and fix that with “reforms” that could not possibly be helpful.
There is no way removing the machines that allow them to do the labor more quickly and easily than doing it manually would help anything. Removing labor saving devices makes things more expensive and less efficient.
Oh, and I also consider “monopoly” to be more a term used in business. Do we refer to our military or police organizations as monopolies on their respective duties? Or our criminal courts? (I’d include jails, but we stupidly tried to privatize them, too.) What about congress–do they have a monopoly on the legislature.
It’s not a monopoly–the post office is just doing its constitutional job.
The answer given was actually a good one even though the timing before an election was bad. The need for letters throughput is long term down, while the volume of packages is up. IF letter sorting machines are removed to make space for package machines then that makes sense. Doing it now does not.
Agreed that USPS is a public service not a for profit business.
Well, what it is and what it should be are different things. As a result of a postal worker strike in 1970, the postal service, which used to be a cabinet-level department of the executive branch, was reorganized. It was done in part so that the workers could organize and bargain collectively. It was done at a time when the postal service was making lots of money. The reform act turned it into an independent agency that was supposed to be pretty much self-funding. Obviously that has changed a lot since 1970.
In my view it should be brought back into being a regular agency. But it is currently set up in a way that requires it to act more like a corporation.
I didn’t say anything about first class mail, only you have, I was talking about correspondence and letters.
My point about the attempts at taxing email was specifically about their attempt at holding a monopoly on correspondence and letters.
If you don’t think that there was a loss of use of mail for everyday written communication, or that that didn’t affect the revenue generated, and that doesn’t have quite a bit to do with the current USPS problems, then I can’t think of any way to break it down in simpler terms for you to understand.
If it can be a revenue neutral service, then great.
However, it is a vital service, and if it needs to be funded by taxpayers to stay operating, then it needs to be funded by taxpayers.
I’m willing to pay a bit more for stamps and shipping if that’s what is needed, and I’m also willing to pay a bit more in taxes, if that is the better solution.
Reallocating them to where they would be more needed could make sense, but that’s not what they are doing. Replacing them with more efficient systems would also be a reason to remove the old, but once again, not what they are doing.
It makes sense to call something a monopoly if no one else is allowed to enter the market. If you started up your own letter delivery service, you’d have to justify it as being faster than USPS can deliver. You also would not be able to use the USPS mailboxes that most people have.
We do talk about terms of the police in that the govt has a monopoly on violence. This is both used in positive terms, in that you may not legally engage in violence without sanction of the state, or with negative connotations, in that the state is allowed to perpetuate violence, and you can’t.
This is an increasingly common tactic, and may be even more widespread across other Government services that we have yet to uncover. In the UK both the BBC and the NHS have been infiltrated this way, and arguably so have some News organisations, judging by the bias that’s creeped in over the last couple of decades.
I hope this will be rooted out and corrected, in this imminent enlightened age. We have to stop the corruption or we’re all doomed.
I think they feel they’ve done enough damage. Those sorting machines they destroyed aren’t going to be replaced. And they’ve already spread a lot of doubt about the reliability absentee voting. Don’t underestimate the importance of that.
Anecdotally, our local farm lost half a shipment of chicks because they died in transit. Anecdotally, my husband ordered tea by mail, and it was tracked so he watched it. His box of tea sat for a week at a distribution center. That’s never happened before. As a result, we had to drink a different type of tea for a fea days. (the horror).
I remember reading years ago (almost certainly an urban, er, postal legend) that stamps would cost a nickel less if Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states, given the higher costs of maintaining postal service 'way out there.
The US actually has one of the best postal systems in the world - it’s one of the few things that allows us to say “'Merikuh, Fuck yeah!” Canada and Japan are probably close to equal and may be slightly better in terms of access to mail delivery/receipt in some areas, but we actually have a very good postal service.
We should treat it like the valuable resource it is and fund it with taxes if needed. And it looks like it’s needed now for the reasons you’ve cited.
There was a comedian some years ago who praised the U.S. Mail and said, “Go up to any stranger in Times Square and say, ‘For less than a dollar, would you take this letter to L.A. for me?’ Yeah, good luck with that.”
I was going to say I don’t think that just Alaska and Hawaii would account for that much - but then I found this report, which is absolutely mind-boggling. If the Postal Service is going to lose money by paying for shipping freight ( which doesn’t go by mail in any other state) , charging Parcel Post prices and providing better service than Parcel Post (parcel post often has to be picked up at the Post Office while Bypass delivers directly to recipients) , of course they have to make up for it elsewhere.
I suspect that DeJoy didn’t know what he was signing up for. He expected a nice, cushy government job where he could manipulate the Post Office to have to pay his logistics company a lot of money as a contractor. He sure as hell didn’t expect:
- to be the guest of honor at two Congressional hearings.
- to be sued by multiple states.
- to be the subject of (unpardonable) criminal investigations by state AGs.
- to have protesters camped outside his actual house.
While Trump remains Public Enemy #1, DeJoy has become #2 nearly overnight. That’s got to be making him rethink whether this whole postal ploy is worth it.
Correspondence and letters are sent First Class through USPS. So, yeah, you two were discussing the same thing.