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What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

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Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#91

Post by rented_mule »

eru wrote: post #83
delichon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.

How does that square with their universal service obligation? Which county is that?

I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#92

Post by danaris »

delichon wrote: post #60
galleywest200 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Besides that junk mail might actually increase if a private company was paid to take it to your house since they would have a profit motive - more junk mail delivered means more profits.

> USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.

And if that's the case, then what it indicates is that USPS in your area is chronically understaffed and underfunded.

Like...c'mon, this is not hard stuff to understand. There's no motive for the USPS to be neglecting last-mile service in your area if they have the resources to provide it.

And this is absolutely caused by Republican efforts to destroy it. Because that's what they've been doing for decades, specifically to get people to think it's doing a bad job, specifically so that they can privatize it and farm out the contract to their big-business buddies.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#93

Post by danaris »

treis wrote: post #45
materielle wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know anything about Germany’s postal service. In the US, what the parent comment was getting it, is why are we even talking about this in the first place? What problem is privatization trying to solve? As an American, I have zero complaints about our postal service or how much we pay for it. Apart from the fact that I wish there were more branch offices and a few more workers at most locations. I don’t think…

The USPS is about $100 billion short in funds for retiree healthcare. Operationally they're slated to run out of cash shortly and that's going to get worse as they have to directly fund more and more retiree health care.

...specifically because they were forced to pre-fund pensions to an absurd degree by a Republican Congress. And the sole purpose of this was to damage the USPS so that it looked like it was doing much worse than it really is, so that they could push for privatizing it.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#94

Post by rented_mule »

eru wrote: post #71
owenthejumper wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, Germany is a densely populated country smaller than the state of California. I think we can stop there? There is really almost no comparison to the US in terms of rural areas anywhere in Europe.

Just split the US into 50 individual territories, if you think that being small is a benefit in service provision. > There is really almost no comparison to the US in terms of rural areas anywhere in Europe. Why do rural people deserve subsidies by virtue of living in the sticks?

> Why do rural people deserve subsidies by virtue of living in the sticks?

For the same reason urban people deserve subsidies, for things like public transportation, by virtue of living in the city. The first sentence of the US Constitution lists "promote the general Welfare" as one of the foundational reasons for the creation of the Constitution. There is no "one size fits all" for a nation this size - the welfare of people in the city and the welfare of people in the sticks requires differing allocations of tax money. Also, mail delivery to the sticks benefits people in cities given that mail in the sticks is often sent to or from cities.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#95

Post by eru »

rented_mule wrote: post #91
eru wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that square with their universal service obligation? Which county is that?

I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.

Thanks! The free PO box is an interesting loophole that USPS can exploit.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#96

Post by eru »

dragonwriter wrote: post #87
charcircuit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination.

> Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination. Yes, it is discrimination. Treating people differently on any basis is discrimination on that basis. It may or may not be illegal discrimination depending on the specifics and the governing law, and it may or may not be unjust discrimination depending on the specifics and the applicable moral framework, but all discrimination means is…

I get your argument, but I suspect it's far too general.

For example, even if you charge people the same _per_ letter, if you just look at eg subsidy per user, it's gonna be widely divergent.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#97

Post by Leonard_of_Q »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37
cobertos wrote: post #14

Doesn't USPS also play a key role in a lot of other services? * ID verification * Vacant home notifications * Registered mail I have a hard time seeing a private company scrupulously handling these operations when the incentives to manipulate them could be very large.

Also voting. If you privatize the post office, then either mail-in voting stops completely, or else a private company can control which mail-in ballots get delivered, and which ones don't .

That'd be mostly a net-positive since mail-in voting seems to be hard to get right in your country. Better to get rid of it in all but the most pressing cases - those who can not leave the house, overseas military and such - and have people go to the voting booth themselves, show their ID, get a ballot and fill it out using a writing implement. Do the count locally at the end of the day and send the ballots to a central location for another count. You'll have a "paper trail" in case the count is questioned, you get the results the same day, you call make sure only those eligible to vote do so and more. If it can be done in places ranging from rural Sweden (population density < 1/km2) to urban India it surely can be done in the USA.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#98

Post by Leonard_of_Q »

comrade1234 wrote: post #21
eru wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, where's the postal service in the constitution? As far as I can tell your constitution allows the federal level to regulate postal services, but it does not require the establishment of government snail mail.

"The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" The wording "shall" is what I meant by weird wording. But no roads? No post offices? Whatever. The constitution is extremely flawed and should be abandoned.

> The constitution is extremely flawed and should be abandoned.

The Constitution is mostly fine and has carried your (?) country for 250 years. It is mostly fine because it is mostly interpreted in an originalist way, i.e. as a document meant to function as the underpinning of a society where all men are equal and endowed with unalienable rights by God. That last bit - God - is as important for those who believe in a god as it is for those who don't because it means those rights are not granted by government and as such can not be taken away.

The wording of a constitution is one thing, the interpretation thereof a wholly different one. Read the constitution of the Soviet Union and you get the impression that there was a state where people really were able to live life to the fullest, helped and protected by the government. Compare it to how life actually looked in that state and you'll get the impression that you surely must have read the wrong document.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#99

Post by eru »

Grombobulous wrote: post #80
eru wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can auction off the universal service obligation to willing bidders without having a state owned enterprise with a government monopoly. > Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet. Please tell me a few.

Sure! Rural areas extract and produce many resources that urban areas depend on. Agriculture, fishing, oil, gas, uranium, wood, maple syrup, etc. You can’t get workforces to live in those places or businesses to operate there if there’s no roads, internet, mail, schools, hospitals, etc (or if those things are prohibitively expensive). Don’t forget that subsidy doesn’t always mean the difference between whether it’s e…

Thanks for your list.

> Rural areas extract and produce many resources that urban areas depend on. Agriculture, fishing, oil, gas, uranium, wood, maple syrup, etc.

Sure, and market prices reward them for that in relation to how useful that is. No reason for a subsidy.

> You can’t get workforces to live in those places or businesses to operate there if there’s no roads, internet, mail, schools, hospitals, etc (or if those things are prohibitively expensive).

Why do we want to workforces to live in rural areas? In any case, land prices will drop to establish equilibrium.

That sucks for land owners, but the workforce doesn't care whether they get their benefits in forms of lower rent or explicit subsidies.

> Don’t forget that subsidy doesn’t always mean the difference between whether it’s expensive or not, it can also mean the difference between having and not having.

Singapore has plenty of rural areas lining up to export to her, without paying any subsidies (above market prices) to them.

> Another reason is that too much regional wealth inequality can be bad for national stability. It can lead to things like civil wars and unrest.

That's a good argument for breaking up nations into smaller units, sure.

Re: What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

#100

Post by eru »

Guvante wrote: post #89
eru wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could auction off a universal service obligation to willing bidders. No need to run a federal agency with a monopoly for that. (And everything you explain could also be accomplished by state-run services, no need to involve the federal level.)

Universal service obligations have been some of the least effective tools used... After all what constitutes not servicing? How would a state run service be better?

> How would a state run service be better?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

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