

Who Killed the Postal Service?  - Firebrand
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/who-killed-the-postal-service/249508/

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droithomme
The only thing that is causing the problem is the federal government has
demanded the USPS pay vast riches into a special tax on them alone which the
government is calling a "trust fund" for "future pension obligations". This is
just a ransacking of the postal service's operating income by the feds. There
is no trust fund, the money is not saved anywhere. It goes into the Treasury
and is spent by the federal government the same year it is received. 100% of
the postal service's financial problems are because of this plunder.

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dalke
"Salaries and benefits make up 80 percent of the Post Office's budget. By
comparison, FedEx spends 43 percent of its budget on labor, while UPS spends
63 percent, according to Businessweek. Why the disparity? As the magazine put
it, "USPS has historically placed the interests of its unions first."

You can't simply compare the USPS with FedEx or UPS. Neither of the latter
provide regular deliveries. How much would it cost FedEx to have a large
enough workforce to visit a significant fraction of the homes in the US every
single workday? For that matter, doesn't UPS and/or FedEx have an agreement
where UPS does the final delivery of some of the packages, precisely because
USPS has most people?

Without that comparison, that comment comes across as a gratuitous slam
against unions.

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dantheman
The only reason FedEx and UPS don't deliver mails is because it's illegal to
compete with the mail service.

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dalke
Yeah, stupid Constitution for giving Congress monopoly power over the mail
system. Silly also that we require universal postal service at affordable
rates in exchange for that monopoly.

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dantheman
I think you're reading into my comment, I was merely stating why UPS and FedEX
don't deliver mail and why comparisons between them and USPS are difficult to
do. Though for completeness there have been people who've competed with USPS
in the past, Lysander Spooner is a notable one.

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buddylw
Ben Gibbard, sadly.

