Five Dollars Postage?

Would you pay five dollars for a stamp?

As shown above, the United States Postal Service does issue five-dollar stamps and has issued them for over 120 years, since back when it was the United States Post Office Department (more about that distinction in a moment or two), but they've always been for large postage amounts for things like packages.  Could you imagine using a five-dollar stamp on a standard first-class letter?

Well, you could, if Trump gets his way - and, what the man wants, he usually gets.  Congress attempted to appropriate a $25 billion grant to keep the Postal Service afloat after reports have strongly suggested that it could run out of money in June, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Trump personally made sure that the Postal Service would only get a $10 billion loan - a loan, as in, it has to be paid back - instead.  A loan of 40 percent of a proposed grant money doesn't make a ton of sense - especially since that loan has to be paid back with interest -  unless Trump's plan is to . . . privatize the Post Office.

And that's precisely what folks say Trump has exactly in mind.

Until July 1971, a taxpayer-supported Post Office Department existed and relied far less on postal rates to cover its operating costs.  But after the 1970 postal strike - which necessitated in having the Army run the postal system for a time - President Nixon took the initiative to convert the post office into a self-sustaining government agency, funded entirely on revenue from its services, with the Postmaster General to be appointed under a board of governors rather than the President.  But since the 2006 passage of a Republican-supported law requiring the Postal Service to pre-pay retirement funds for its workers, the agency has been under duress, even as increased electronic-mail usage had been gaining at the expense of postal mail.  It should be noted, by the way, that the Postal Service had trouble in its first decade providing service commensurate to price.  In 1971, when the Post Office Department became the Postal Service, the first-class letter rate was six cents; by 1981, after ten years of runaway inflation and increasing energy costs due to two oil crises,  that rate had tripled.   

Even so, 55 cents to mail a letter today - note that it took 38 years for the rate to go up threefold from 18 cents - is still a good bargain, compared to other countries.  Germany, a country the size of Montana with 83 million people, has higher postal rates than the United States, a country of 327 million people in an area a thousand-odd miles wide and three thousand miles long.  The Postal Service is a national treasure.  But without proper funding, it can't do its job. And without the funding it needs from the government, a subsequent shutdown would allow Trump to swoop in and hand it over to private operators who could charge what they want and make people pay more for all of its service - parcel post, certified mail, registered mail,, even first-class mailings.   Five dollars to pay a bill or send a greeting card?  If it makes someone rich, well, yes, er're going to have to pay five bucks to mail the most basic card or letter.  There may not even be universal postal service, because there's no money in that..

And stamp collecting - already an expensive because of the supplies and minimum number of stamps in one issue that you have to buy if you collect them mint - will only get more dear.

And now people are talking about voting by mail?

We can't let the post office go toward full privatization, something Nixon envisioned when the current system was set up nearly fifty years ago as a precursor to that possibility.  We need to make sure the public mails stay public.  I've already written my congressional representatives about the issue.  You should too.