
The Postal Service Deserves a Permanent Bailout - erentz
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/the-postal-service-bailout-coronavirus-covid-19-congress.html
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AtlasBarfed
I'm in favor of a bailout, but only if mail is substantially reworked to
prevent the unbelievable flood of tree-killing paper spam I get deluged with.

It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of
mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings.

We need some way of imposing additional costs on mail marketing, such as
required payments to people if mail arrives at their mailbox. It is mentally
taxing to sift through crap mail searching for relevance.

The USPS also needs to establish some sort of official email for people with
similar spam suppression requirements, so that legal or official government
messaging has an appropriate destination besides "kill tree, send mail".

In the 1990s I worked on a USPS project, and the sheer size of bulk mail
processing (aka junk mail) in facilities was probably 100x what the mail
processing for personal letters was.

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titzer
> It absolutely depresses me to think of how many hundreds of millions of
> mailboxes are filled on a daily basis with unneeded paper mailings.

This is a direct function of the completely misguided (IMHO) idea that
government services need to be sustainable only on usage fees. That's a
failure of understanding what government is _for_ and effectively a regressive
tax. We need another mechanism for keeping the system efficient. Making it
market-based isn't the only one.

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8bitsrule
That would be much less of a problem if bulk mailing rates were eliminated. As
for the evils of government, I hesitate to even think about what the corporate
solution to the coronavirus would look like.

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rmrfrmrf
Repeal the PAEA, pass a postal banking act, and fund the USPS with taxpayer
dollars as is allowed by the Constitution. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

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adelHBN
I am all for bailing out USPS. But it won't be permanent. They'll have issues
again, their very nature of being a government-operated institution guarantees
that.

This is not the first time the USPS is in trouble. After the financial Panic
of 1837, the USPS almost collapsed. Congress had to step in to help it, and by
1845 they gave USPS complete monopoly, which killed the more efficient and
cheaper private mail delivery enterprises. See "America's First Great
Depression" by Alasdair Roberts.

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jumelles
It hasn't been government-operated since 1970.

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didgeoridoo
It’s an independent governmental agency under the executive branch. If the
USPS isn’t “government operated”, then neither is the CIA, FCC, or Social
Security Administration.

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adelHBN
Great reply. That's exactly what I said. Fannie Mae isn't technically
government-operated - but it's a government-sponsored enterprise.

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acdha
The story really should have lead with “repeal the 2006 PAEA” which imposed
funding requirements given to no other business:

[https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...](https://ips-
dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it)

The USPS would have been cash-flow positive for years had it not been
deliberately sabotaged by Republicans seeking to privatize it.

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prirun
In any business, when demand shrinks, the business has to also shrink. I don't
understand the need to have 6 day/week delivery in modern times when there has
been such a huge decline if mail volume. It seems to me they should have cut
this down to 3 days a week, then 2, and I don't even think 1 day/week would be
unreasonable for 1st class mail. But maybe that doesn't work logistically
because they still have to store the mail they're not delivering (even though
there isn't much of it).

Doing the package deliveries - I dunno. It seems like if there was a demand
for this service, more competition would have sprung up for FedEx and UPS
without the USPS needing to get involved. Then again, maybe the USPS is
helping to keep shipping rates down. Hard to say what prices would be if the
USPS hadn't gotten involved in package shipping, overnight delivery, etc.

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jedieaston
I mean, it's not like the US would let the USPS fail, as that'd cause so many
dependent businesses and services (if nothing else, the IRS and Census forms)
to fail. Unless they plan on running a free internet line to everybody's house
that can have messages jammed down it very cheaply, but that seems more
expensive than keeping the USPS around.

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toomuchtodo
How do you vote by mail (the most secure way to vote when one cannot vote in
person) without the USPS?

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rhexs
UPS or Fedex, shockingly, can easily deliver envelopes!

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colejohnson66
Those don’t have a legal mandate to deliver to every address in the US.

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msla
The USPS doesn't deliver to every address in the US.

I lived in a place with an address but no USPS mail delivery. UPS and FedEx
got there.

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calmworm
Can they simply offer a “no ads/no bulk mail” USPS+ option? $5/month? I’d be
happy to pay it. It would save a lot of processing costs and trees too.

I’m not sure what they are making more than that off my mailbox per month now
though.

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foxyv
We need to bail out the Postal Service so they can stop needing to make money
on junk mail.

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burmer
Props for the photo caption too

