Going Postal On the Postal Service

Republicans in Congress, smelling blood, are once again ready to shoot the wounded.  This time their target is the United States Postal Service, which is losing money rapidly, but not because of decreased volume due to the recession or the Internet.  The Postal Service has been required to prepay into federal employee retirement funds because of a law passed by Congress in 2006, and so it's been losing money even as its overall mail volume is actually increasing.  Without the prepaid retirement fund mandate, the Postal Service would be solvent.  Now, it's headed toward financial collapse.

President Obama is already reported to be in support of one proposed solution, ending Saturday deliveries. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe plans to close 12,000 post offices by 2015.  This could help, but not much.  In the meantime, House Republicans are leading the charge to privatize and ultimately emaciate the Postal Service, reducing its presence in small towns that depend on its deliveries and thus cutting people off from their most essential public service. 

The Postal Service is a constitutionally mandated government agency, and by having the retirement fund prepayment mandate eliminated, it could run more efficiently and more cost-effectively than it currently does, and it runs pretty efficiently already.  It could raise rates to make more money than ending Saturday delivery would save, and it asked the Postal Rate Commission for the permission to raise rates.  But neither Congress nor the Postal Rate Commission is interested in helping the Postal Service come up with long-term solutions to its problems; both of those ideas have been rejected.

The Postal Service has repeatedly been barred from offering new products and services over the years, largely due to fear of competition among private shipping and parcel delivery companies.  Harvard political science professor Elaine Kamarck offered this example of how the government prevents the Postal Service from operating like the profit-making business it's supposed to be.  Internet shopping, Kamarck said, should have generated much more business for the Postal Service with the delivery of packages to individual households.  "But," she said, "parcel shipments were generated by large organizations and the USPS was not allowed to negotiate discounts and thus lost business. It was forbidden by law from lowering prices to get more business. This resulted in the entirely incredible situation in the 1990s where the United States Government negotiated an agreement for the delivery of U.S. government package services with Fed Ex because the USPS was not allowed to negotiate for lower prices."

The Postal Service looks like a carcass that's about to get its bones picked by a Republican political establishment in Washington that wants to put more of the public realm in the hands of profiteering businessmen that don't give a damn about the Constitution ("The right to make profits is not in the Constitution!" - Michael Moore), even when it mandates a public service that makes goods, services, and - most importantly - information available to everyone.

A weakened, private postal service run by profiteering special interests? Send that idea back return to sender.  Americans should realize that, at 44 cents to send a card or letter to anywhere in this geographically large and topographically diverse country, the United States Postal Service is still a bargain.   

Oh yeah, October is National Stamp Collecting Month.