Conservatives want to kill it so there is one less example of thing the public sector does well, but given that, I think there may be a case to use the internet to do things that are now done on-line. I’d like to look at providing every home in America high-speed, reliable internet along with a standard printer that can be serviced by USPS employees. Give me an option to refuse mass “mailings” as well and I’d be a happy camper. We can certainly work out a scheme for certified mail and other services that are provided by the USPS.
Maybe some small, rural communities would be hurt by jacked up prices for delivery of physical items, but fuck 'em. They vote solidly Republican anyway and can live with the consequences of their choices for a change.
You want the government to get into the printer business? You want USPS employees going to people’s houses to fix their broken printers?
Good luck with that. You know you can already buy a printer at Best Buy or anywhere else for around $100, right? What would be the value of the government getting into this business?
You want it run as a business. It is. It is controlled by the government because of
So, it is overseen by the government, but it pays for itself, aside from the self-destruct bomb that the conservatives put in, requiring the retirement funding for almost a century.
Let me say it again, it pays for itself. It is marvelously efficient. What exactly are you pissed about?
Oh, that UPS that can do no wrong. Last year I ordered a package that I was promised to arrive on a particular Saturday. I saw online that it had arrived at the local UPS so I went to pick it up- turns out that they didn’t feel like delivering to my address that day so they took it to USPS for them to make the final delivery. What would UPS do without the USPS to deliver to addresses that they don’t feel like serving? And what would the cost be to pick up a letter at my house and deliver it across the country in two days? Dare I say more than 45 cents? But how can that be? With the magical wonderful efficiency of the private sector, they can’t beat government workers? The only answer MUST be to shut down the government service!
Pity I don’t retain the details of every article I read. I can only say rural Georgia, according to an article about how, if you’re a company that needs to have things delivered, FedEx will take all your shipments and not tell you which ones will be flown to Atlanta and then shipped via the US Postal Service. Because it’s cheaper to send it USPS than to make a truck run for an unprofitable number of packages.
All you can do when your customers complain that their delivery is late is trace it and blame it on FedEx. And it wasn’t just a few small towns, it was something like anything more than X miles from (list of profitable cities).
Given the success of UPS, FedEx, et. al. I would think at this point that the USPS could be privatized or dropped. I’m not a USPS hater, though, and I think they generally do an amazing job.
And, indeed, the Postal Service subsidizes UPS and FedEx by offering below-market prices for last-mile delivery.
And one of the reasons that a basic service like postal service should be regulated by the government is so that it can set standards, such as not being able to refuse to deliver to certain areas, like UPS and FedEx can do.
No. I’m in disagreement. That’s different than not understanding.
It’s run “as if it were” a business, per the cite. I’m saying if that’s true, why not spin it off and make it private?
Regarding the constitutionality: I agree, the Post Office is constitutional. That doesn’t mean that it must be run by the government and cannot also be done by the private sector. An activity being constitutional doesn’t make it reserved as a government function alone.
The Pony Express was a private company. It failed because the company did not get the USPS contract, the Civil War diverted attention, the riders kept dying and the telegraph played a role in its demise.
Not everyone has Internet access.
Not everyone has Internet access.
Overnight delivery is often too expensive.
Not everyone has Internet access. Most people do not use Facebook. Do you trust Facebook with anything anyway?
It’s just another example on the side tangent of out of control public sector unions. I already stated, if unions were the only problem with the PO, we could just give them the Wisconsin treatment and cut them back. But that’s not the core issue.
My solution to the cop problem I described would be to eliminate unions from the police, along with all other public sector unions while we’re at it. That would eliminate a lot of these excesses. Of course privatizing the police would be a bad idea and you know I wasn’t suggesting it.
I guess I would like to know your rationale for not thinking it is done well. I’m assuming it’s rational, and not ideological.
But it is all but private. The only thing it doesn’t do is try to make a profit. Putting private individuals in charge would make it not controlled by the government.
Right now it is run as a private organization controlled by the government. You want it to be run by an actual private organization not controlled by the government? What benefit would that have? Aside from letting the private org. close down access to small towns and raise prices?
Ever been around an old person and a computer? A dedicated device could print out mail and save hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This is not “getting in to the printer business” anymore than the USPS is “in to the truck business” because they buy delivery vehicles.
Of course it’s not like we’ve had any success with the government building dams, or roads, or canals, or dredging rivers.