Trumping the Post Office

So, eh, what does Trump have against giving the Postal Service a nice big grant in the middle of a deadly pandemic, especially when it's the pandemic that has been the source of the Postal Service's most recent troubles?

Well, he explained from the Oval Office that the Postal Service has been needlessly losing money by charging ridiculously low rates to send packages to addresses, allowing Amazon - whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, also owns the anti-Trump Washington Post - to make an equally ridiculous profit at the Postal Service's expense.  He instructed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to go ahead in negotiating a loan with the Postal Service contingent on promises of postal reform, but under no circumstances is Mnuchin allowed to give the Postal Service a grant with no strings attached.

Gosh, Trump's idea sounds so capitalistic, so business-friendly, so perfect for . . . a private company!  I am not an economist, but if the Postal Service were to raise its package rates - if it were to quadruple them, as Trump suggested - Amazon and other mail-order companies would have to spend more money to ship things and ultimately pass the costs onto . . . us?  You think Bezos is going to take one for America by sending things out without raising shipping fees for the customers?  And while the Postal Service, a self-sufficient government agency since 1971, may have to pay its own way, it is still a public entity that is required, as it should be, to deliver mail to everyone, and it is thus a nonprofit enterprise.  If the Postal Service were to make a profit, you'd have to privatize it - which is what Trump wants - but to become profitable, it would have to stop delivering mail to smaller communities on money-losing routs - which, again is what Trump wants!  Because otherwise,voting by mail - which Trump doesn't want (except for himself) would be way too easy!

We could be in a serious situation by September, when the Postal Service - which is also known for sending out life-saving prescription drugs - is expected to run of out of money.  Truth be told, companies like Amazon are actually keep the Postal Service going by using it.  But if the Postal Service does run out of money and goes down, voting by mail will be an irrelevant issue, because we won't be able to do anything else by mail either.

There is a bright side.  People are suddenly buying stamps in enormous quantities, especially stamp collectors.  And when people buy more stamps than they need or buy stamps they don't intend to use, that provides a lot of extra revenue for the Postal Service.

The solution to keeping the Postal Service going while Trump is in office and/or at least until the coronavirus pandemic is over is quite simple, really.   If you save stamps, stamps will save you!

Happy collecting.

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.