Pulaski

Which is all wholly irrelevant when 75% of their non-parcel/ non junk-mail business has already gone, and the rest is disappearing rapidly.

RoadWarriorFromLP

Source: Made-Up Statistics Administration

The volume is obviously downtrending, but the reality is this:

-First-class mail (i.e. your run-of-the-mill letters, etc.) volume peaked in 2001.
-Last year's volume was about 2/3rd's of the peak, and about equal to what it was in 1984.

http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/pos...since-1926.htm

Let's put that into perspective. They deliver more than 68 billion (with a "b") letters per year, plus 90 billion other items. Revenues in 2012 were about $68 billion. If the post office was a Fortune 500 company, it would be ranked in the top 50, with revenues about equal to Pepsi and Caterpiller.

As an entity, it's obviously still very large, even with declining volumes. Who in their right mind would say that there is no merit in an enterprise that generates that kind of money?

And there are obvious things that could be done to make it profitable if necessary, but nobody in the Republican party will allow those things to happen. They want it to fail so that they can justify selling it off, and they are deliberately engineering it for failure.

Michael

In California, cities that own their own power plants provide their customers with power that is cheaper than power from the private sector. Since so many cities were successful at doing this and other cities were proposing their own projects, it scared the private utility sector and they put a referendum (prop 16) on the ballot in 2010 that would change the California constitution forbidding local communities from financing public utility projects unless they got a 2/3rds approval vote from the community.

Even though the proponents of the referendum outspent opponents by 500:1, the referendum failed. The primary proponent of the referendum was PG&E with 99% of all the money spent on it's Taxpayers Right to Vote Act. Fortunately even with the massive amount of money spent by PG&E, the referendum failed.

Although California forbids public utilities from spending any money on referendums, it does not forbid private utilities from spending money on referendums so all the money PG&E spent was likely passed on to their customers.

California cities are doing nothing different that what private business has been doing and wants to do with USPS which is to take away the most profitable business from the other leaving the other with the money losing operations.

scrubbedexpat099

Education Google Denver Public Schools and PERA.

Fire Where I am it is done by a fire district, the stories I hear...

Main benefit seems to be that the volunteers get free gas for themselves and their sometimes extended families, then there was the trip to Las Vegas...

Police

Well we have Town, County and State, all with over lapping responsibilities. Difficult to imagine a more inefficient system.

Bob

So you'd rather ring up and shop around while your being robbed or have your house burn down, to find the best price of someone coming by to help out?

Okay.

Steve_

Well education isn't entirely a public service, because there are private schools obviously, but this is a good point and why they're going on about charter schools - run by private companies.

Private security companies have been around forever, private detectives, bail bond agencies, debt collection, etc.

A lot of fire departments are contracted out to private companies too.

I think govt. intervention is not necessarily a bad thing, depends on what it is and to what degree, but that doesn't mean a monopoly per se. You can talk about healthcare for example, but in the UK you don't have to use the NHS. This is the problem with the healthcare system here, single insurer so it's basically completely nationalized, there is no private option for any covered service.

Monopolies are a bad thing, and if you don't believe me, try buying a beer to drink at home in Toronto.

Steve_

There's two parts to this - yes it is true the Republicans are trying to sabotage USPS with idiotic pension requirements but it's also true that it does lose money at a high rate regardless of anything they've done.

If rates were raised overnight to what they are in Canada and Saturday delivery ceased too, people would complain mightily, it's not just Congress. And even then, pensions and other benefits would have to be cut back drastically like they have in Canada, so the APWU would be lobbying Congress too.

I can understand the American mindset towards taxes - you fill in a 1040 every year and what precisely do you get for your federal income taxes? Sweet FA as far as can be seen. All the things that matter to you come out of State and local taxes, do you really care about building aircraft carriers, buying F-35s and daisy chaining Border Patrol agents down the border?

So you look at USPS and say "hey, there's at least one thing the bastards do for me, why should I pay even more for it?"

In Canada it's different because taxes are spent on things that are more tangible like healthcare so I think we see the illogic of the postal service more objectively.

Sally Redux

Private companies will only be interested in profits, obviously.

So they will only want the profitable parts of the postal service. Private schools want the brighter kids. Private healthcare insurance companies want people who never get sick.

They also don't want oversight into how they work, an important safeguard in public schools and healthcare.

I don't really know how private fire and police services would work. I guess the old idea of having to have a plaque on your house showing you were covered before a fire would be put out.

Steve_

Well it's obvious how they work, and it's obvious how they make money too. If you contract out fire services and you're a small jurisdiction, a private company can have economies of scale, e.g. by being able to arrive from another jurisdiction. Or consolidating multiple small jurisdictions.

There are thousands of police departments in the US.

Like I said, there is a role for government, i.e. oversight and I'm sure in some jurisdictions it does make sense to have your own fire dept., i.e. large jurisdictions.

And it's not necessarily the case that nationalization is better than privatization for safety and qualities of service, just look at Detroit for example. Their school system is appalling.

The question is striking the right balance as private businesses tend toward monopolies if they can so there is always a role for the govt, even if it is only anti-trust.

RoadWarriorFromLP

Raising the price of a stamp by a nickel would raise about $3 billion. Cutting Saturday service would save another $3 billion.

Do those things, and eliminate the dumb pension accounting scam instituted by the Republicans, and you can say goodbye to the deficit. The problem of the deficit is largely an accounting fiction.

If the USPS did what other post offices do by getting into other businesses, such as banking and insurance sales, then it could turn a profit. But the post office isn't supposed to turn a profit -- it's a public utility that was being subsidized back during the supposed libertarian paradise of the 19th century.

Steve_

And if they'd stop printing $1 bills, and changed all the vending machines to take the $1 coin, I'd be able to buy a can of pop a lot more easily.

But frankly I think there's more chance they'll have NFC payment points on vending machines before that.

I know, just had an idea, the USPS could use VTOL F-35s for rural deliveries. Two birds with one stone.



The landing fee must be paid using $1 coins.

Actually the post office always seems to be the only place that gives out $1 coins in change.

steveq

No, they want the rich kids AND the smart kids. They are even prepared to take from the rich kids to give to poor smart kids, because smart kids show up really well in SATs etc.

RoadWarriorFromLP

I never claimed that it would happen. It's obvious that those who want to deliberately engineer its failure want to invent problems, not fix them.

The points are as follows:

-The deficit is essentially an invention. It doesn't have to exist.

-The post office was never intended to be profitable. Yet suddenly, we have a bunch of clowns shouting about it as if it's some kind of failure if it isn't profitable.

They're moving the goalposts, while simultaneously deliberately moving the ball away from the goalposts. Right wingers are complete fools not to see this.

Sally Redux

The question of who educates poorer, less-bright kids and those with special needs remains.

steveq

But that wasn't the comment. We'd covered less bright rich kids (and to a lesser extent, those with special needs) in my comment. Plenty of private schools take kids with special needs.