No Mail Today . . .

The Postal Service recently announced that it wants to end Saturday mail delivery after August 3. If you're reading this blog entry the day it was published, a Saturday, consider reading this blog on Saturdays as a future alternative to waiting for the mailman. :-D

Seriously, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe hopes to save $2 billion a year with this move, after the Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion in fiscal 2012. Delivery of packages would continue on Saturdays, and post offices would remain open on Saturdays for mail drop-offs and stamp sales.

The polls show that most Americans are fine with this plan, but members of Congress - you know, the same Congress that forces the Postal Service to overfund its health care and pension plan, causing its benefit reserves to be greater than those of the federal government as a whole, which is why the Postal Service is in this mess in the first place - are opposed to it, and on a bipartisan basis. That shows you how far folks in Washington are behind everyone else. Congress keeps trying to make Donahoe's efforts at modernizing the Postal Service and adapting it to an age when more people are communicating on the Internet more difficult. I have a feeling that Republicans in Congress are trying to break the Postal Service and take it toward full privatization, if they can't do away with it altogether. (Who benefits from a crippled Postal Service? FedEx and United Parcel Service.) Even if the Postal Service is merely privatized, that would have a negative impact on the unions.

Speaking of which, several postal unions are also opposed to this change. It would obviously reduce the number of postal employees. But Donahoe's plans sound reasonable enough to save the agency from further losses in light of the reality that members of Congress talk a lot but do nothing. Remember also, the post office is constitutionally mandated, yet it's had to pay its own way since 1971, when it was reorganized to run solely on income rather than on income and revenue. Members of Congress could decide to repeal the postal pension pre-funding mandate. They've chosen not to.

I'm comfortable with the end of Saturday delivery.  I can wait an extra day or two longer for a bill. And if I want to mail a birthday card to someone and I want it to arrive before the weekend, I'll mail it earlier.