Whenever someone says “in other words” whatever follows is entirely made up.
The post office has not been under constant attack from conservatives or anyone else, that is delusional.
What are they doing that private companies can’t do? They are in a business where they have no legal competition and lose $5 billion a year.
I am liberal, but a long-time federal bureaucrat.
There is a legitimate discussion as to the size and role the “permanent bureaucracy” ought to have. Some folk think it constrains elected officials, or has too much power. Others favor privatization. Others see short-term personal benefit to be gained from reduced regulation and oversight.
I’m not sure what qualifies as a conservative, but I would be surprised if we could see a strong consistent correlation between R administrations (in states or nationally) and government spending, amount of regulation, or size of public workforce.
The requirement to fund pensions for people who aren’t even born yet sounds to me like a pretty significant attack. As do all of the calls from Republicans to abolish the post office.
Anyone who wants to is allowed to compete with the post office. UPS does it, FedEx does it, nowadays Amazon does it too. Those companies aren’t allowed to use the specific receptacle set aside for the post office, but there’s nothing to stop anyone who wants one from putting an Amazon box or a UPS box on their front porch for receiving deliveries from those services.
And what the Post Office can do that all of those companies can’t (at least, not profitably) is to deliver to everywhere in the country, even out in the boondocks.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution would disagree with you.
Generally speaking, the idea is that some government agencies can outlive their usefulness, and should be abolished when that happens.
Here in Texas, we have something called the Sunset Act (passed in 1977), where each state agency has a date on which it will be abolished, UNLESS the Legislature passes a bill to continue it. This is typically every 12 years. An agency called the Sunset Commission advises the Legislature on these decisions.
They can also recommend changes to the agencies, or moving their functions to other state agencies better positioned to perform them. And they also have a duty to examine the functioning of the agencies relative to the public to make sure they’re relevant and beneficial.
So they act as a periodic watchdog for state agencies making sure they’re relevant and acting in the state and public’s best interest. For example, there’s a lot of noise about abolishing the Railroad Comission, or renaming and restructuring it to better reflect what it is (the agency that regulates oil and gas production and distribution in the state), and to make it more handy to the state and public, as it is supposedly not acting in the people and state’s best interests, having been infested by industry lobbyists and things like that.
To me, this kind of thing is the best sort of conservatism- it’s not willy-nilly removal of agencies, and nor does it allow for ossified, irrelevant agencies to just float around sucking up resources in their senility either.
Of course, the Legislature itself is often the biggest stumbling block, by not voting on Sunset bills in time, or at all, and allowing necessary agencies to sunset on occasion.
Anyone can compete with the USPS in package delivery or extremely urgent message delivery. Competing with them in letter delivery is illegal.
The package delivery companies can not profitably deliver to people in the sticks, but neither can the USPS which is losing billions every year.
This is flatly incorrect.
In what way, pray tell? Just because they’re not permitted to place items in home mailboxes, doesn’t mean they’re not permitted to deliver to every address in the nation. UPS and FedEx manage to do quite well for themselves without placing items into people’s mailboxes.
No private company is allowed to deliver first class mail.
Parcels and urgent deliveries are not first class mail.
Originally there was no exception for any “letters”, specified of a particular size, urgent or not. An exception was eventually carved out for urgent deliveries because people who genuinely needed fast, reliable delivery were actually purchasing overnight from Federal Express, and also buying and cancelling USPS postage on the urgent letters to remain within the law, so that they could rely on the more reliable private company. The USPS was getting paid for other companies delivering urgent mail, based on their monopoly of that service. This eventually became too ridiculous, and the exception was finally carved out.
But they maintain that monopoly on non-urgent letters. No competition is allowed.
And for a bit of prolepsis, just because this always comes up…
I’m not exactly sure what the rationale is for people who rely on a higher-cost service to be charged the same price as people who rely on a lower-cost service, but this doesn’t change the underlying point here: Even if a private company serviced every single location in the US, within a relatively fixed time frame and at a fixed postage rate (in other words, under similar sort of delivery conditions as the USPS), they still wouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s against the law.
Deliver mail to rural people. Because yes, delivering mail to Bumfuck, Kansas is not going to be profitable. We could make mail fully private, and say goodbye to receiving mail in a timely manner in rural areas.
Now, I live in a city (and in a liberal state too) so none of this will impact me. But despite the fact that the majority of rural people in America are opposed to me politically, I definitely dont wish harm on them. Removing their accessories to cheap and quick mail will hurt them, no question about it. Why fuck them over like that?
Self-labeled conservatives only want to get rid of or reduce government agencies which appear to be detrimental to their own interests or do not contribute to their interests. Hence, no taxes except for war, no services nor protections for poor or oppressed people, close the borders. Their interests are always selfish and usually racist and misogynist.
Self-labeled liberals want to get rid of or reduce government agencies which to them seem either to enable oppression of others (like ICE, or the Defense Department). They otherwise approve of government by and large.
Self-labeled conservatives only want to get rid of or reduce government agencies which appear to be detrimental to their own interests or do not contribute to their interests. Hence, no taxes except for war, no services nor protections for poor or oppressed people, close the borders. Their interests are always selfish and usually racist and misogynist.
Self-labeled liberals want to get rid of or reduce government agencies which to them seem to enable oppression of others (like ICE, or the Defense Department). They otherwise approve of government by and large.
sorry double post.
Do you know of any private companies that have lobbied to deliver all classes of mail to all addresses in the US and its territories?
BTW I could slip a letter into a manila envelope with a FedEx label and have it left on the front porch of any physical address the driver can find (they have trouble in my remote locale). I’ve sent non-urgent documents by DHL. When I was a bicycle courier I hauled documents, some not quite “urgent”, like BankAmerica press releases I took to San Francisco media outlets. Those would be emailed now. But a “no competition is allowed” claim is incorrect. They just can’t deliver to a mailbox.
I made a PO Box pickup today and saw a notice: USPS receives zero tax money. So efforts to destroy USPS have nothing to do with “helping” taxpayers.
And that’s why we have a national postal service. USPS doesn’t drive down my dirt track. Stuff lands in my PO Box in a timely fashion. Deliveries here cost much more than postage.
I’m reminded of a test run some years back (sorry, no cite) comparing USPS with US shipping services. A team repeatedly shipped a box containing sensors recording movements. USPS moved the box more but all the commercial carriers slammed it more. The post office abused the box much less that the private firms.
That’s what I said above. Liberals want gov’t that helps people; “conservatives” want gov’t that hurts people. It’s innate - search on liberal conservative brain differences for studies of “red brain vs blue brain”.
The USPS itself disagrees with your hasty legal analysis here. The monopoly extends beyond use of the box.
The existence of exceptions – which have already been pointed out, no less – does not imply that no rule exists. The purpose of this rule has been explained in this thread, many many times already: the monopoly allows the use of high-profit routes to subsidize high-cost routes.
“I made a PO Box pickup today and saw a notice: USPS receives zero tax money. So efforts to destroy USPS have nothing to do with “helping” taxpayers.”
Then with what money is it funded with?
Right now, debt.
They’re going billions of dollars more into debt every year.
Congress forced the USPS to fund its pension liabilities, not in itself a ridiculous proposal, but only gave them ten years to make the transition, which was not nearly enough time to make such a large change. A longer horizon would have been more reasonable.
The organization can’t continue to lose billions indefinitely. Something’s going to give, one way or another.
Yes, something like 40 years for the transition would have been better.
I do wonder about what government functions are best handled at what level, and also when it makes sense to merge or split off an organization.
Sometimes when people call for the elimination of, say, a cabinet level department, they’re calling for pieces to be merged into other departments. E.g. DOE, which is a relatively recent agglomeration. The science parts could be handed to NSF. The nuke stuff to DoD. I don’t think this is a good idea, for reasons that would warrant another thread, but it’s not totally outlandish.
Other times it’s because they feel the function should be handled at a local level. I see this with ED. Again, I don’t entirely agree, but I get it. It’s like how we don’t do all our policing at a federal level. But I certainly don’t have a good rationale for what should be handled at what level.