Absentee ballots can be sent with private couriers like FedEx. That's actually what some people living overseas have to do. Election commissions can choose to send ballots via private mail couriers as well, and allow people to print and send self-certified ballots.
How much does that cos? The post office is cheap for a lightweight letter (and I can use a stamp from home), but if I use FedEx I generally have to go to their local shop and pay a few dollars
There's no point in covering any US government shutdown more than a week or two before it happens. We've turned political gamesmanship into a refined art-form.
Everyone knows the USPS isn't going to stop running. Republicans will try to gut the union as a precondition for emergency funding. Democrats will try to beef up the retirement funds. Of course the head of the Postal Workers Union will want to prevent the former from getting pushed through the negotiations, so they'll talk up the potential shutdown now. But that doesn't mean it's a realistic outcome.
We'll inevitably get a shitty, 18 month funding deal out of it, and kick the can down the road to the next congress. It will suck, we'll live with it, whatever. Everyone knows this is the outcome though, and there's no point talking about THAT stupid game when we have the stupid game of the week to cover -- in this case, re-funding the Paycheck Protection Program.
The postal service is subject to a law saying it has to pre-fund it's benefit plans; this is due to a law passed by the Republican congress specifically so they could point to the USPS failing finances and use that as the excuse for privatising it.
Just another part of our American heritage getting looted by private equity.
Uhm, pre-funding benefit plans seems like a very responsible thing to do, given that many entities completely avoid funding them thereby creating ever increasing black holes of liabilities.
Without them, administrators have the ability to spend as they please by handing out future liabilities.
And FYI 'heritage' is no business to keep something operational. Either it works well, or it doesn't.
Proactively sabotaging something and then using the consequences of the sabotage as evidence that it should be dismantled isn't "it either works or it doesn't". Such details actually matter.
Incompetently legislating some thing to ruin isn't a failure of the thing, it's a failure of the people writing the legislation.
Requiring that benefits are accounted for is not 'sabotage', it's actually sound and transparent financial accounting.
Such details actually matter!
If, after the real cost of operating USPS is exposed and they cannot cover it with revenues - or - cannot be subsidised enough - then the US can make a more rational decision as to whether or not it should exist.
That's a model not based on reality but on theory exercises with a set of axioms that get handpicked to support an a priori assumption, regardless of reality or evidence.
People on purely ideological grounds killed off, for instance, the USPS savings system, which was a profitable banking arm.
It took 20 years, for instance, of foot dragging after the stamp was tied to inflation to keep it good forever and not lose value. That was part of the original bill but killed off to make things more broken by people who run on "government is broken"... Yes, you're the one breaking it.
People on pure fundamentalist ideology grounds have aggressively redefined the post office to force it to be unprofitable. The free market fundies have been yelling the "Communist" cry about usps since the 1950s, stabbing it at every opportunity.
It's also not a fair analysis because fedex and ups get subsidies, tax breaks, and other kinds of assistance on the million dollar scale all the time, many times a year. They aren't free agents in the slightest. And unlike usps, they aren't being administered by people who want them to crash and explode.
Many other industrial countries can do this at profit (Canada for instance), but of course, we are told we can't look at that either. It's such crazy time eating nonsense. They bark back that we dare ruffle the robes of the high priestess...pearl clutching is what they turn to.
"We could fix it but then we wouldn't show how broken government is .. durr durr" knock it off already.
These ideological fundies are con artists, a 21st century version of a street hustler who hide behind optics and theater. It's a huge criminal violation of the public trust
The very nature of the USPS, that requires massive government support just as mail usage fallen by 50% in the last 15 years, that few people use it for material purposes, that it continues to have massive unfunded pension liabilities - is ideological.
That is should exist, or be 'owned by the government' is ideological.
You haven't provided any evidence for your cynical argument: Using FedEx and UPS examples abnegates your argument because although they do receive subsidies here and there, it's nowhere near the magnitude of USPS. If the USPS were to need only that level of assistance, few would be concerned.
Regular mail is an antiquated service that has considerably less value in the 2000's - it's a dying business and should naturally shrink to a tiny fraction of its previous use. Almost every bit of paper in the mail today is a waste, there's hardly a need for it.
The Royal Mail [1] has been privatized and it's doing mostly fine. Not perfect, but arguably better than before.
The fact it works well enough, informs us that those who believe mail must be public, archaic and highly subsidized are the ideologues.
Personally, I don't care, but I also do not see gigantic public entities being able to adapt to major changes in market conditions.
What America needs more than a debate over public or private is considerably better regulation in banking, finance, consumer goods etc..
It's my understanding that parcels are where the money is. Is that wrong? Parcel volumes in my country are up north of 150%, I'd expect similar or even higher numbers in the US.
But if they really are dependent on letters, why? Letters are a dying business and there is no future there.
It's because they have a legislated monopoly on letters. For parcels they have to compete with UPS, FedEx and others, so they have to price those competitively or they'd get no business, which means they have thin margins there and even then lose a lot of the volume to competitors.
But they can't just charge arbitrarily much for letters because people would stop sending them, which is really what they're doing regardless.
Most mail services make all their money on 'junk' mail. I don't know what the numbers for USPS are, but their biggest problem is likely the lack of advertising in the form of mass mailings.
Yes, the price of advertising in their inserts fell 40% literally week to week. They always send my busines an advertising opprtunity and my zipcode for minimum of 1000 mailpieces was $199 last week, and is down to $120 this week.
Furthermore over 80% of advertising is for food and inhouse services - oil change, furniture shopping, pet grooming etc. Virtually all these businesses are shut off for the time being, hence no need to advertise.
My understanding is, unlike any other government agency or business, the USPS is required by law to fully fund 50 years of pensions.
If that requirement were removed, it would be fine.
This is an anecdote not data, but I've heard several USPS delivery folks mention that a lot of long-tenured drivers decided to take vacation and sick time when the lockdown started ramping up. This has caused other drivers to pick up the slack so there may be a lot of overtime getting paid out.
I can't get the numbers to add up here. Even with letters down, advertising down then their revenue should either be flat or have a slight increase based on my guesstimate for their increase in parcel business.
Interesting. You think UPS and FedEx aren't interested in the new money on the table from advertisers that are suddenly willing to pay their higher prices?
This has two components. First, Trump hates the Postal Service, because he mistakenly believes that they are giving Amazon (owned by Bezos, whom Trump despises) too good of a deal:
The second part is that Republicans believe starving the Postal Service will be yet another hurdle to throw in front of mail-in voting, which is gaining momentum amidst the coronavirus crisis. After all, without USPS, there wouldn't be a low-cost option to mail ballots.
The entire thing is cynical and vile.
edit: judging by the downvoters I guess I hit a raw nerve...
Maybe it's time. The whole USPS as a quasi-governmental entity thing has been an anachronism for about a hundred years and a farce ever since email replaced its raison d'etre.
Just delete every law on the books that distinguishes it in any way from UPS or FedEx and let it live or die on its own merits.
Or maybe we accept that the postal service was important enough to include in the constitution, [1] stop demanding an important government service pay for itself, and just give USPS tax funding to make up any shortfall.
Lets also not forget that UPS and FexEx often use USPS for the last mile of their shipments. [2]
The post office was important in 1787 to "provide the means of intercourse between the citizens of remote parts of the confederation, on such a regular footing, as must contribute greatly to the convenience of commerce, and to the free, and frequent communication of facts, and sentiments between individuals."
It is totally obsolete for this purpose, having been almost totally supplanted by phone calls, email, text messages, IM, and video calls.
you either support some things being nationalized for the greater benefit of society, or you take the neoliberal approach and say “there is no society, may the best corporation win”.
I have no doubt that privatizing all mail can generate better margins and return some nice profits to a handful of individuals at the expense of less citizens having access to the service.
It's only efficient as a way to funnel taxpayer money into stockholders' pockets. "Privatizing" a service but continuing to pick winners and subsidize them isn't really privatizing and isn't compatible with a real free market. It's literally a kind of command economy, albeit one designed to benefit only a few.
What mail? Spam? People don't mail things anymore. It's why they're going out of business.
And it's not like mail would be unavailable. If it cost $2 for rural customers to mail a letter instead of $.50, would it really matter for the two letters that still get mailed a year?
"Many people rely on physical mail for things like social security checks, taxes, bills, communication with family and friends."
A somewhat higher postage rate would not affect this that much, and no, there are not that many people always sending letters, and broadband isn't required to pay bills.
The vast, vast majority of mail (even bills sent etc.) is completely wasted, it would be incredibly more efficient to dump it in lieu of sending 'only the mail that is needed'.
If starlink gets off the ground as promised broadband will be a solved problem.
I feel like the most likely scenario right now is it will take on a limited form of its current self, maybe delivery once per week? Much higher postage?
My brother bought a rural place that doesn’t have any internet whatsoever, and it’s not that far out in the sticks. If internet access is needed to interact with the government/banks/etc, we have to do better to provide it to rural folks.
You can get a phone line basically anywhere for the same reason you can get mail there, and if you can get a phone line then you can get dial-up, which doesn't get you YouTube but it does get you email and online banking and all of those sorts of things.
Yes, dial up is technically still internet... But do you really get internet that way? Websites these days are made for broadband, some of them coming in at a few MB just to get to the login screen. Plus you gotta turn off all non-essential internet communication in Windows (telemetry, updates, ...) or that 4 kB/s you get are lost to that. If you're paying by the minute it's going to get expensive real fast.
Its purpose isn't to be real internet, its purpose is just to do what the postal service does. It doesn't matter if cnn.com has 500MB of javascript because you're not going there, you're just doing email and banking.
You assume that all these people have AC current. I know for a fact that at least half a dozen american in West Virginia (lincoln county) get there only electricity with solar panels.
Yes, they can access their emails thanks to the public library, but how much longer this public service will stay open?
"Up to date"? The latest version of Windows 10 can technically run on hardware older than anybody would have any interest in using. Like late 1990s or so. Anybody can get a much newer PC than that, like an early Core i5, for around $50-$100, which someone might actually want to use.
Dial up is slow. But if that's the problem you want to solve then how do you do it by subsidizing the postal service?
I just paid my credit card bill at 50k down/20k up. It's fine. Took about half an hour, but I'm browsing HN (also throttled) in this tab so it's not too inconvenient. You could also read a book or cook or something.
Yeah, sorry man, but you're dead wrong. As he said, you're really disconnected from reality here. "All those things can be done electronically" -- lol. You must not have interacted with many government agencies.
You can do your taxes electronically, I've done it. You can have your social security check direct deposited. "Bills and communication" is your bank website and email, not a government agency. All those things can be done electronically.
I think you're being willfully obtuse, so there isn't much point to trying to help you understand. You're too stuck on the singular point of whether it's physically possible for something to be done electronically, and ignoring every other factor.
I'm more concerned that it may be drastically expensive-- or completely unavailable-- for rural people to receive packages. Right now UPS/FedEx/etc don't go everywhere and rely upon USPS for last mile in many areas.
You know what? The best solution is lifting taxes (most of them don't pay much anyway) and usual phone bills (that are freaking expensive for the service it provides). it will probably cost less than to pay for the last mile.
Anybody who can't afford to have a courier hand-deliver the thing and is still doing it has no idea how much a lawsuit actually costs.
This would also provide an opportunity to fix it the other way -- instead of requiring the USPS to do it, allow any certified letter carrier to do it even if it's UPS or FedEx.
