The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#471

Post by treis » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

runako wrote: post #276

bhupy wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#U... By law, private corporations aren't allowed to deliver anything to your mailbox, only the USPS can.

Thanks! On the one hand, it seems unfair. On the other hand, since they don't have any cost-competitive offerings, it seems like a non-issue. I'm a big fan of the USPS, but if it looked like FedEx could help push the letter rate down, I would be a fan of revoking that law. (If a private carrier committed to serving 100% of the USPS coverage area.)

They don't have a cost competitive option because they're not allowed to offer one. They can only deliver "extremely urgent material" by law.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#472

Post by coliveira » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #445

coliveira wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect, please do some research and see that it is not like this. For example, here is the article from Business Insider: "[the law] required the post office to calculate all of its retiree pension and healthcare costs for the next 75 years, including for people it hadn't even hired yet, and put away enough over the next 10 years to cover them. To put this in perspective, that'd be like you only working from age 1…

>MYTH: the USPS is required to fund pensions for the next 75 years, for workers who haven’t even been born. >“[T]he PAEA required the Postal Service to calculate all of its likely pension costs over the next 75 years, and then sock away enough money between 2007 and 2016 to cover most of them.” The Week, April 16, 2018. >FACT: the actuarial valuation methods used by the USPS are based only on accruals attributed to p…

This is saying basically the same thing in a different language.

> In this method, yes, the actuary calculates the value of all benefits to be paid out in the future, due to past and future service, and then subtracts out the value of the future accruals, to calculate the actuarial liability.

I.e., the USPS has to raise the money to fund liabilities for 75 years, and it had to do so in 10 years, which essentially meant that they had to operate in the red making its financial situation even more complicated.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#473

Post by treis » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:00 AM UTC

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #462

missedthecue wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is more expensive because it must be shipped as a parcel rather than a letter. They can't ship it as a letter because it's not legal to.

I guess I don't understand the logistical difference, then, because that sounds like a semantic difference to me. What stops FedEx from saying "we ship this parcel for the same price as USPS ships a letter"?

They're prohibited by law:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/320.6

There are minimums they can charge and some speed requirements.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#474

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:01 AM UTC

djur wrote: post #374

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep using the word "unprofitable" to describe services that have a higher cost to provide. These things are premium services. Private companies are happy to provide them to anyone willing to pay their costs plus at least the market rate of return, precisely because doing that is profitable.

They are not profitable at the rates necessary to keep them universal.

The example you're using is election mail. That's paid for by the government. How is it possible for the rate they'd have to pay in a competitive market with low margins to make it non-universal and yet it isn't already? If you want to deliver to everybody then you have to pay the cost to deliver to everybody, one way or the other. Subsidizing it through more expensive postage (disproportionately paid for by the poor) seems obviously worse than paying for it through taxes (disproportionately paid for by the wealthy).

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#475

Post by seebetter » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:04 AM UTC

teslabox wrote: post #25

There are various advocates for allowing the USPS to return to the banking business. They would put the exploitative check cashing stores out of business. Ellen Brown's has written a copy pieces advocating for postal banking. What We Could Do with a Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure that Doesn’t Cost Taxpayers a Dime - https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do-with-a-po... (2013) This piece concludes by su…

Why can't a person open a bank account?

I mean, I can't because I sold some bitcoin via Bank of America 4-years ago. Someone stole my info, I reported it as fraud and BoA reported me for fraud -- and all my bank accounts closed. And they refuse to fix it.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#476

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #352

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The USPS, libraries, public schools provide basically guaranteed service to anyone, anywhere. Libraries are a public service. They're free. The people who use them don't have to pay anything for it, which is a boon to those who otherwise couldn't afford it. It's basically a public subsidy for access to books. The postal service is a business. There isn't supposed to be any subsidy, you pay for it through postage, a…

The postal service is in fact the only agency explicitly mentioned in the US Constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause Whether it operates like a business now, it was absolutely intended to be a function of government.

The constitution also gives Congress the power to borrow money and declare war. That doesn't mean they have to do so at any given time.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#477

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:07 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #414

tptacek wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but even if I was to agree with you about wealthy people supporting structural racism, how do you connect that back to wanting to privatize the Postal Service?

> Ok, but even if I was to agree with you about wealthy people supporting structural racism, how do you connect that back to wanting to privatize the Postal Service? Poor people (including, disproportionately, minorities) are more likely to depend on public services! They're also more likely to be hired by public agencies and receive good salaries and job protections[1]. They're less likely to live in areas that priv…

You don't need a public postal service to achieve those ends. Many European countries have partially or fully privatized their postal systems: https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/privat.... The government then pays a subsidy (which can be easily scrutinized) to maintain universal service obligations.

Purposefully making public agencies inefficient in order to ensure "good salaries and job protections" for workers is a bad idea. It's highly not-transparent, and it's impossible to figure out how much the public is paying for those "good jobs." And also, you end up getting crappy service as a result. (Public transit agencies in the US are great at providing jobs with "good salaries and job protections." They're bad at providing transit. Meanwhile, in countries like Sweden, there is a lot of privatization in the rail and transit industry. Stockholm's subway, for example, is operated by Hong Kong's subway company. Denmark has bus and train lines operated by Deutsche Bahn. Europe is far ahead of the United States now in public-sector privatization.)

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#478

Post by quickthrowman » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:15 AM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #470

quickthrowman wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? When it comes to delivering first-class mail for cheap, I assume there’s a minimum population density that allows for such a thing to be done cheaply (similar to now) and profitably. The US has nearly an order of magnitude lower population density than Germany, I’d bet there’s a threshold somewhere in that range where it wouldn’t be possible to deliver a mail anywhere in the US by a private company for similar r…

> When it comes to delivering first-class mail for cheap, I assume there’s a minimum population density that allows for such a thing to be done cheaply (similar to now) and profitably. This is a bold assumption that needs backing, because it would suggest that Germans or Britons would be paying 2 orders of magnitude more on sending paper mail than Singaporeans. It also presupposes that private corporations must absol…

> This is a bold assumption that needs backing, because it would suggest that Germans or Britons would be paying 2 orders of magnitude more on sending paper mail than Singaporeans. It also presupposes that private corporations must absolutely turn a profit on every piece of mail that they deliver to every destination, but that’s not how most enterprises work — there can be sustainable loss leaders. It also presupposes that we ought to subsidize rural paper mail delivery rather than charge the true price, which is also debatable.

No, it’s not. Singapore and the US are both an order of magnitude outside the range of the other 3 countries. I would imagine delivery is cheaper and/or more profitable in Singapore, considering it’s a densely urbanized city-state comprised of multi-tenant housing. Germany, UK, and Japan are all roughly similar in density, and I bet it costs a bit more to mail a letter in Germany than Japan. I also bet it’s profitable in that population density range. It clearly is, since they’re operating private companies!

The US is also vastly larger than any of the referenced countries, and has some huge areas with extremely low density. The population density of all of the land area of the US excluding the Northeast region has a population density of 50/sq mi or less (excluding islands). The US has unique geographical and size challenges that none of the countries listed that have privatized their post offices have.

Clothing, food, and housing haven’t been strictly government provided services ever. This is not a good analogy or argument, sorry.

Also, 55 cents is a not a regressive pricing scheme against the urban poor. 55 cents to mail a letter isn’t going to inconvenience anyone. You’re getting disingenuous here, I’m going to disengage.

One last thing, USPS ends up doing last mile delivery for a lot of rural address UPS and Fedex packages. You’re not arguing in good faith, I’m done.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#479

Post by mindcrime » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

djur wrote: post #167

mindcrime wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't share that view, but i do think that there is a fraction of hardcore liberterians that truly believe we'd be better of without many of the government-founded services such as libraries, schools etc. Just to be clear, we don't have any problem with schools or libraries. We just think the model of having governments collect taxes and then pay for those things is broken. In consequentialist terms, it's broken be…

In deontological terms, taxation is not theft, because theft is the unlawful taking of property, and taxation is lawful. To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state, and most people are not going to accept that premise, which is why libertarian rhetoric in practice tends to rely on casuistic arguments about waste-fraud-and-abuse, red tape, and so on.

and taxation is lawful.

And that notion is what many of us reject.

To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state

Not exactly, although plenty of Libertarians do reject the legitimacy of the State out of hand. I find the issue to be more nuanced than that. If you hold, as Bastiat did, that "the law" (aka "the State") can be something like - but no more than - the "collective extension to our individual right to self defense" and that no mere aggregation of individuals can have a right to do anything that a single individual doesn't have a right to do, then you can conceptualize a State that does things like, say, protecting private property, but which can't lawfully require payment of taxes.

All of that said, I didn't come here to write pages and pages on political theory. There are entire books that treat this entire topic much better than I could. I'd refer anybody who is interested in this to The Law [2]by Bastiat, as well as the works of Lysander Spooner[2] among others.

[1]: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysander_Spooner

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#480

Post by WarOnPrivacy » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 3:17 AM UTC

bhupy wrote: post #451

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider any tangible thing that's wrong with America - shareholders whims are likely to be a part of that equation. This is a state of affairs we need to consider rolling back, not expanding.

That’s comically simplistic. If you actually drill down into every tangible thing that’s wrong with America, you’ll find that root causes are actually pretty complicated.

I'll grant that a speedy misreading of what I wrote could lead someone to a conclusion that was simplistic or even comic. It's been my experience tho that folks on HN tend to carefully consider context and intent - and are less likely to arrive at misguided conclusions.

That is a fine thing and I am grateful for it.