Because maintaining the USPS is a federal obligation as stated in the fucking Constitution. Anyone that doesn’t understand this hates America and has AIDS.
Why would they start listening to the Constitution now?
Weird Trump replaced Dejoy
Even weirder Biden didn’t
Well, he’s fired in 3…2…
Dems: but but but you need a quorum and the procedures say that
Why the fuck this is even something that is in question is just crazy, but that’s the insidiousness of a right wing cult that keeps shifting everything to the extremist right wing.
I don’t believe a thing these people have to say at this point.
I’m hoping he’s being truthful. I not only believe the post office should not be privatized but should be subsidized. It’s a vital government service.
Yeah, the fact that the USPS has been able to fully financially support itself (in spite of congress continuously trying to kill it) is a testament to the fact that it’s a vital service.
He probably wants to read your mail.
If he is so willing, Id be more than happy to direct the 8 credit card offers capital one sends me every week to his mailbox and away from mine. They must have killed at least two full trees by now sending me the same bullshit shit every week for years
They transport trash. Literally.
Their business model is collecting literal trash, in bulk, from various businesses, and evenly distributing it to every residence in the nation. From there, that trash is deposited directly into solid waste streams, recollected by sanitation engineers, and transported to landfills.
The only value the postal service brings is establishing a baseline price for low-speed package delivery that keeps UPS and FedEx from jacking their prices to the moon.
You probably are unaware that both UPS and FedEx both contract USPS to deliver their parcels. Both last mile and long distance as well. A lot of packages are picked up by USPS their UPS store, and delivered to another UPS store, after a nice markup.
Also neither UPS or FedEx deliver or have any interest in delivering to every address I the US and its territories.
Very well aware of both SurePost and SmartPost. You’re not telling me anything new. Both of those services rely on the fact that the USPS subsidizes their delivery services through trash distribution. They charge businesses to transport trash to mailboxes, where it ends up in a wheely bin > trash truck > landfill.
As I’ve mentioned in other comments, I don’t want USPS privatized. I am only pointing out that their core competency is not delivery. They are trash distributors. Garbage providers.
The old “every door, every day” model is propped up by hundreds of pieces of trash for every actual delivery. It is not sustainable.
USPS needs a presence throughout the country. Every residence should, indeed, be served by the postal service. But, that doesn’t mean they need to go everywhere, every day. They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.
They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.
They don’t need to switch to anything so long as they’re properly tax funded like they’re supposed to be (they aren’t, Republicans have been bleeding their finances for decades). For instance, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.
Remove R oversight of the post office and roll back their ridiculous demands and your problem is already solved. Postal struggles are a problem manufactured by conservatives in an effort to sell you a solution to the problem they caused.
Not having to finance that overmassive backlog of cash, combined with a little bit of updating advertising law to the modern age, solves your problem three ways over.
But naturally this will never happen because that $72B is specifically earmarked to be looted by the government once they finally manage to kill and privatize the USPS. That’s the real reason that pension fund exists.
The problem I am talking about is with their basic business model, and has nothing to do with how badly the Republicans are managing (bungling) their operation. The problem I am talking about is not at all related to their pension fund.
If the USPS operated on the internet the way it operates in the physical world, they would be immediately added to the blacklists on uBlock Origin and PiHole. That is the problem. They exist primarily to serve the needs of marketers rather than the general public.
The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation’s inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago.
To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.
The postal service is being forced to use same business model today as at the time of the nation’s inception. The only thing it is being allowed to do is convey physical media to the public’s door. It has not been allowed to explore natural extensions of that, such as banking and telecoms.
Ehh, personally I don’t really see banking as being a natural extension of the post, but I can kind of see where you’re coming from with that in context of the rest of the argument.
However, USPS is not a business. It is a tax funded service. It was never intended to be profitable, it was intended to perform a necessary service for citizens. You cannot have a functional society without a way to transfer mail. Therefore, it is a responsibility of every government to provide a postal service.
The fact that USPS has been forced to become profitable in order to survive, largely because of their federally mandated $72 billion money pit, is exactly why they have to accept a bunch of money to deliver you a bunch of garbage. If they weren’t beholden to draconian financing rules that literally no one else is subject to, the cost of stamps alone could power the entire USPS (and did, for over a hundred years).
However I’m not sure that’s the entire problem though. I don’t believe that USPS has the legal right to just decide not to deliver mail to you that they don’t like. If Capital One wants to mail you a credit offer and they spend the money to send it, I’m pretty certain that the post office is legally obligated to deliver it. So even if they came out and said officially “we will no longer deliver spam” I don’t think that’s a thing they’d be allowed to do. And that’s a good thing! Just, as usual with most things now, corporations are abusing it to death. Effectively outlawing paper spam would reduce a lot of the USPS’s active income, but it would also massively reduce their workload. No longer requiring USPS to be profitable enough to build a nest egg should go the rest of the way to pretty much even that all out in the wash, I think. But this is legislation that would need to take place on the corporations’ side, not the post’s side. The post is legally required to deliver all mail that is legal and deliverable, and this is good and right. Making spam undeliverable is a better solution than making the post office decide what they want to deliver or not.
The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation’s inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago […] To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.
Absolutely agreed here, 10/10 no notes. The fact that much of our important communication has now moved to the internet is a brilliant argument for expanding the USPS to also become a federal universal internet provider. I think that’s an excellent idea. 99% of phones are VOIP now anyway so they barely, if at all, even have to worry about a telecoms department specifically.
I think we’re both mostly on the same side here, I’m just under no impression that the post office needs to be profitable. It is a public service, it’s by definition an expense that taxes are intended to cover - and one that I’m happy to put my tax money into, even now. I’m also upset at the sheer volume of waste of postal garbage that is going around, but I’d rather have a post office with some trash in it than some trash with no post office in it.
It is a tax funded service.
It is not. Nor should it be. I’ll get back to this is a second.
Capital One wants to mail you a credit offer and they spend the money to send it, I’m pretty certain that the post office is legally obligated to deliver it.
They are, indeed. The problem is not that Capital One wants to spend money mailing that offer. The problem is that Capital One is getting a deep discount on postage, to encourage them to send that offer physically, by mail, instead of through a more appropriate channel. The postal service needs Capital One to do that, because they need the postage revenue to justify the cost of sending someone to every door, every day.
Going back to your last point about taxpayer funding: should Capital One’s choice to send you an offer be subsidized by the taxpayer? Should they pay less for a stamp because the federal government will be picking up the tab?
The postal service either needs to be entirely self funded, or access to that service needs to be restricted to “acceptable” senders, which opens an entirely new can of worms.
As you pointed out, the USPS can’t simply reject Capital One’s mail; they are legally required to deliver it. Any operational subsidies to the USPS are funding Capital One’s marketing budget. With the tax-funded model you are talking about, we are paying for Capital One to send that junk mail. That’s simply not feasible.
Effectively outlawing paper spam would reduce a lot of the USPS’s active income, but it would also massively reduce their workload.
Not really, no. Yes, they are handling fewer pieces of mail, but their workload isn’t really based on that. The principal factor affecting their workload is the number of doors they have to visit. (Even if they dont have a delivery, they might have a pickup, so they still have to visit the door and look for the outgoing mail flag.)
Eliminate all the junk mail, and your mail carrier’s bag is a little lighter, but she is still taking the same number of steps on her route; he is still racking up the same number of route-miles on his truck’s odometer.
We should just have them take on the additional role of rolling out a nationwide, subsidized, high speed fiber network.
It’s not a business. It’s a service.
Yes, of course.
The service they provide is, primarily, the conveyance of trash to every residence in the US.
Sure, they also transport various papers and small packages, including (once upon a time) children.
But their core service is trash distribution. They transport hundreds of pieces of trash for every letter and package they also deliver.
I don’t know what the solution to all that trash is. I don’t think the postal service should be privatized or disbanded. But, it is a trash-supported platform.
I think they should become a basic, cashless banking service. Direct deposit, debit card, nothing fancy. No commercial loans; only treasury securities, with interest paid through to depositors.
Universal access banking. Force commercial banks and payment processors to unfuck themselves if they want to keep customers.
Let banking become their core service, and they can reduce/eliminate their trash distribution service.
You’re fixating on a symptom, not a cause. What you’re really concerned about is the parasitic nature of predatory marketing. That’s where all the garbage comes from. If you changed the USPS the way you say, all that trash would migrate to other delivery services. Attack the root cause: predatory marketing.
Edit: typos
It costs about $4.50/pc to send local junkmail via UPS or FedEx, vs $0.24 via USPS.
Junk mail exists only because the USPS exists to deliver it. USPS exists (in its current form) only because of junk mail. There is no “root cause”. It’s a synergistic relationship between the two.
Transition the focus of the USPS to other essential services, like cashless banking. Abandon the trash delivery service.
I see this is going nowhere. Good luck out there
You can see this isn’t going the way you want it to.
At $4.50 per piece, marketers are going to move away from physical mailers, and toward other marketing options. Most are going to do that at far less than $4.50/pc. Most bulk mailers would abandon the practice well below even first class mailing rates. USPS sets their bulk mailing rate with the specific intention of keeping the bulk mail business that funds their operations.
USPS money orders are (were) the standard for reliable, secure transfer of money. Recipients of postal money orders knew they were good, and demanded them over personal checks and even cashier’s checks in some cases.
There is room for the USPS to enter into basic, universal access banking services, providing accounts to anyone who needs one. They could then reasonably expand to compete with usurious payday lenders, driving them out of the market. They could operate as a payment processor, competing with Visa and MasterCard, driving down their obscene rates on every purchase.
Basically, there’s a lot more that the postal service could, and should be doing instead of delivering trash.
Hard to believe DeJoy stepped down. Guess he got an offer from a right wing think tank or something.
No, he had literally done everything he set out to, and packed it in. He accomplished his mission.
So he is there to kill it.
and senators and congresspersons keep voting for bills that they oppose
reality is topsy-turvy and i honestly don’t have a handle on wtf
So, he is actively in the process of privatizing the Postal Service.
What they say and what they do is two different things.
I think all the mentions of post and letters (in terms of what is allowed and regulations) in the us constitution only apply to USPS and not private companies like UPS.
I wonder if that’s positive or negative in terms of ie. privacy
Yeah, ok.
