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The USPS is more than a service. It's a symbol of a functioning society

THAT'S called a "dodge". Cite, chapter and verse. I challenge the assertion.

I'm not interested in doing a deep dive on the purpose of the early postal service. It really isn't historically disputed and its not really something I'm even interested in debating to be honest with you. I'm not going to troll through volumes of the minutes of the Philadelphia Convention, Elliots Debates, Founders' letters and the like to prove the obvious.

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Take notice of it, or not, I frankly don't care.
 
Goddamn I hate privatization "experts".
They go into song and dance about this or that government agency losing money but when it comes to evidence that the privatized replacement has driven performance down, costs up and waste and fraud are running rampant, they just repeat the song and dance about government not being able to do anything right.

I refuse to pay eight bucks to mail a letter and fifteen bucks to mail a DVD when fifty cents is okay for a letter and three bucks is okay for the DVD.

No, they do things more efficiently. Actually right now what we're accomplishing is we're essentially subsidizing the creation of ****ing garbage.

In the grand scheme of things, low volume mailers are subsidizing high volume mailers.
 
The financial statements also show that absent those annual $5Bn payments, USPS would be either in the black, break even or only slightly in the red.

No, absent those payments they lost nearly $2bn in 2018 off of $70bn in revenue and that loss widened in 2019 to $3.5bn in 2019
 
I'm not interested in doing a deep dive on the purpose of the early postal service. It really isn't historically disputed and its not really something I'm even interested in debating to be honest with you. I'm not going to troll through volumes of the minutes of the Philadelphia Convention, Elliots Debates, Founders' letters and the like to prove the obvious.

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Take notice of it, or not, I frankly don't care.

For the EARLY United States.
BINGO.
The Post Office was originally chosen to run the phone system in the Netherlands.
That's because it was felt that telephony and telegraphy were a natural extension of postal communications by mail.

In 1893, postal system and telegraph and telephone services were brought together to form the Staatsbedrijf der Posterijen, Telegrafie en Telefonie (approximately, “National corporation for Postage, Telegraphy and Telephony”), shortened to PTT, under the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce.

Today, the Dutch have a privatized postal system called PostNL.
*In June 2013, PostNL announced that to reduce costs in the face of declining volume, it would be eliminating Monday deliveries (accounting for only 2.6% of volume), cut the number of post boxes in half, and reduce the number of post offices from around 2,500 to about 1,000. From 2012 to 2013, the organization reduced the number of mail processing locations from 260 to 145.


I don't know about anyone else but the above* looks to me like a decline in both service and performance.
And that is, in my humble opinion, our future as well if Trump succeeds in destroying the USPS.
And by the way, you STILL have not told anyone what will happen to all those billions the USPS already PAID IF Trump shuts them down.
Will they be diverted to the pockets of his cronies with impunity?
I say that is exactly what will happen, because there is nothing in the text of the PAEA to STOP HIM from doing so.

And if that is okay with you along with costs like eight and fifteen bucks minimum to mail anything...I dunno, sounds like it sucks ass to me.
 
I don't know about anyone else but the above* looks to me like a decline in both service and performance.

And now they don't need subsidy. https://annualreport.postnl.nl/2019/performance-statements/financial-statements

You need to read some Bastiat, that which is seen. Sure, if you subsidize a post office, you'll see branches, but profit and loss tells you whether or not those activities make sense and right now, those financial activities tell you that the USPS doesn't make much sense.

The subsidy of course comes from somewhere and that which is 'not seen' -- what other things could that subsidy have been spent on? That's the opportunity cost and no matter how you slice it there is one.

And that is, in my humble opinion, our future as well if Trump succeeds in destroying the USPS.

If the USPS were privatized, there would be countless people working day and night to try to figure out how to make it a solvent, efficient and ongoing concern.


And by the way, you STILL have not told anyone what will happen to all those billions the USPS already PAID IF Trump shuts them down.

Talk to the pension fund. Those monies were paid to the fund, that's a separate entity.

I say that is exactly what will happen, because there is nothing in the text of the PAEA to STOP HIM from doing so.

They currently pay into FERS. Stop, you're just making shit up now.

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And if that is okay with you along with costs like eight and fifteen bucks minimum to mail anything...I dunno, sounds like it sucks ass to me.

But that's not what it would cost and in any event the people who mail things should pay the full loaded cost of mailing those things.
 
They currently pay into FERS. Stop, you're just making shit up now.

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The postal workers do but we are talking about the annual $5Bn payments for the PAEA.
Show me where that goes into FERS, using the text of the PAEA, because I can't seem to find it.
 

---Less delivery days, less processing facilities, higher postage costs, fewer mailboxes, sure...sounds GREAT!!!
For who? For the stockholders, for the end users, not so much.

But that's not what it would cost and in any event the people who mail things should pay the full loaded cost of mailing those things.

You don't know that, so now who is making things up?
I know what it costs to mail a "FedEx Letter".
BTW in a privatized system, persons in rural locations would most likely have to go into town to GET their mail because a privatized system will not deliver to unprofitable locations and since we are decidedly NOT the Netherlands, there's way more of those locations here in 'Murica.

Well great, whereas before for centuries you could go to your mailbox and get the mail and now you have to make your way into town instead.
Before, we used to clean the tap water and now we have to make our way into town and BUY water that is fit to drink
SWELL IDEA!!!

Lewis Black on Milk and Water




"You know, there was three or four different rooms.
I could go into my basement, and I could get clean water, and drink it.
And then go back out and play, and those were great times.
But then, then we decided every town and every village
which had all the water coming to it,
and all they had to do was clean it, said: "We'll save money.
We won't clean the water so much, and with the money we can save,
we can then buy the water at the supermarket."

"Try to go through this logic with me.
Our country had water coming to our homes, and even if we were locked out,
we could still get it.
Clean water, and we said, "No! F*** you!
I don't want it to be that goddamned convenient.
I wanna drive, and drive, and drive, and look for water, like my ancestors did. "
 
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No, absent those payments they lost nearly $2bn in 2018 off of $70bn in revenue and that loss widened in 2019 to $3.5bn in 2019
That's simply not true. It's awfully convenient that when you are challenged about your false statements it is simply "inconvenient" to back them up with facts.
 
I'm not interested in doing a deep dive on the purpose of the early postal service. It really isn't historically disputed and its not really something I'm even interested in debating to be honest with you. I'm not going to troll through volumes of the minutes of the Philadelphia Convention, Elliots Debates, Founders' letters and the like to prove the obvious.

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Take notice of it, or not, I frankly don't care.
It would be far more believable if you simply admitted you didn't care about facts to begin with. Then I could have put you on ignore and skipped the nonsense.
 
The Postal Clause does not require the government to run a postal service, it permits it, nothing more. The federal government can absolutely privatize USPS tomorrow.

I would be interested in hearing a legal opinion on this idea of yours. You may be right but how could a future privately held USPS comply with the desires and original intent of Benny Franklin? After all, the majority will soon be filled with either original intenters or textualists. They would have to ignore over 230 years of historical precedent to allow it. What would be the difference if they just called FEDEX the USPS or UPS? Or even the Internet and be done with any bricks and mortar? Its an interesting question. Do you have some legal basis or link supporting your view here?
 
That's simply not true. It's awfully convenient that when you are challenged about your false statements it is simply "inconvenient" to back them up with facts.

The controllable loss is still a negative number. That loss is adjusted for expenses beyond management's control, like congressionally mandated pension payments.

It would be far more believable if you simply admitted you didn't care about facts to begin with. Then I could have put you on ignore and skipped the nonsense.

You're still denying that the postal service was intended to produce revenue. Really?

Willful ignorance is a good look. Feel free to ignore me.
 
for the end users, not so much.

Right now the end service costs more than the end users are actually paying for it. If the end users value the service, they should be willing to pay more.

But instead you want to pull a subsidy from somebody else to make up the difference.
 
No I was mocking you bringing up private prisons.

You got nothing. You know there's another dozen examples of privatization messing up good public services, so you mock instead. Bye, there is nothing further to discuss because if there was, you'd have something beyond mocking.
 
Right now the end service costs more than the end users are actually paying for it. If the end users value the service, they should be willing to pay more.

But instead you want to pull a subsidy from somebody else to make up the difference.

Know that $2.11/gal you pay at the pump? The US taxpayer has been underwriting subsidies for decades.
Do the oil companies PAY the military for all that security around the world where they have interests?
The real price of gasoline should be about eleven bucks a gallon.
You talk of subsidies as if the USA has never done such a thing before.

And I am not interested in Donald Trump's idea of what a post office should be run like.
 
Know that $2.11/gal you pay at the pump? The US taxpayer has been underwriting subsidies for decades.

The oil companies should not be subsidized. I'm more Ron Paul, so I would absolutely slash the military budget by 75-80%, but that being said the oil companies product is singularly subject to peculiarly onerous taxation.

Bottom line when you spend a $1 on oil/gas, the governments get far more of that dollar than $XOM's shareholders. Not even close actually.
 




I know there are people that find this movie to be cheesy or bad, but I like it. The book is far better though. In fact, I had read the book as a teenager just a few years before the movie came out. I remember seeing the first few scenes of this trailer and thinking "I wonder if this is a movie based on The Postman?". I got more and more excited about it the further the preview came along, although I did feel the trailer misrepresented the storyline a bit.

It fits with the concept of this thread though.

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You got nothing. You know there's another dozen examples of privatization messing up good public services

See: UPS/Fedex and every other freight service in an industry that is hundreds of billions of dollars, mostly with profitable companies actually producing taxation instead of consuming it.

USPS is NOT a public good.
 
See: UPS/Fedex and every other freight service in an industry that is hundreds of billions of dollars, mostly with profitable companies actually producing taxation instead of consuming it.

USPS is NOT a public good.
Those private services are not held to anywhere close to the same standards as the USPS.

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Those private services are not held to anywhere close to the same standards as the USPS.

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They're better.

They're held to a better standard, if they don't produce services their customers are voluntarily willing to pay for, the customers purchase that service from somebody better.

The reason profits and losses are important is because its a signal. Its a signal that what you're doing either makes economic sense, or it doesn't.

Ultimately if a private business continually loses money, it will go out of business, ending the failed experiment. That doesn't happen with government though which doubles down with subsidies and we wind up continuing to do things that don't make sense.

The USPS is a declining segment, producing subsidized junk mail, according to the GAO, running perpetual losses.

But Congress doesn't care like shareholders care. Right now the shareholders would be hiring a BoD who would hire executives who would be doing everything in their power to restructure the business so that it didn't make sense and if they failed in the endeavor, they would have their capital at risk.

Congress doesn't care, well, I shouldn't say they don't care now because now all of a sudden it became a political issue because politicians see their reelection chances impacted by it.

So of course they just want to throw money at it. $20bn.

WTF do they care? Its not their money.
 
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