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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.
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.
This is what they do now. Some counties and cities tax junk mail, this is very effective. When my city did this, it so affected the amount of paper being recycled that the city worried that people were no longer interested in the recycling program (they figured it out). You can't blame the USPS for junk mail. They deliver, as fast as they can, and that's it.
One thing that should be brought back to the post, and my president, Elizabeth Warren, agrees, is payday check loans. That used to be a USPS service, and it was very popular. The payday loans were always locked with interest no higher than inflation, so it wasn't a disaster if you got one. In the 1940s. the USP Savings System held billions in receipts, and was so trusted that even the rich invested in it.
When banks returned to full health, the "government monopoly" was taken from the USPS and ended up in the hands of a bunch of predatory check cashing companies that you now see littering every struggling neighborhood in the USA, except in the few places they're banned. Ironically, the 1980s destroyed the small town community bank (part of Reagan's legacy was the S&L scandal), which were supposed to be replacing the USPS, and the extortionists proliferated. Major banks are now in the game, offering payday/salary loans with 200-300% introductory rates.
Blame this guy.
It goes without saying, the business of payday loans hits the poor hard. Interest can reach 1000% if payments are missed, it's hell. In contrast, the USPSS helped establish credit for millions of working poor people in America. Even when it was judged "redundant" in the late 60s, over a million people still had an account with USPS. And nobody ever talks about it.
They also establish postage rates. Those rates are specifically designed to maximize revenue from junk mail. So, yes, I can actually place a large part of the blame for junk mail directly on the postal service. They need the revenue from that junk mail to stay solvent. Without that junkmail, they would bankrupt themselves.
Which means their primary business is trash distribution. If uBlock functioned in the real world, the first thing it would block would be highway billboards, followed immediately by the USPS in its entirety.
I fully agree with that. Basic banking services should be a core function of the post office.
Yes, I know, I meant that you can't blame the USPS for being required to function as a corporation.They are constantly targeted. If they were to not generate a profit, this would surely give more ammunition to the morons that think privatizing (more to the point, destroying their union) the USPS will make things better or more efficient. By necessity they have to make money where they can.
I brought up the old credit and savings service because it provided genuinely useful and helpful options for people, and it generated enough money for the post that they didn't have to lean on such cheap tactics as soliciting junk mail. I don't think the thousands of mail sorters are happy about it either; it's demoralizing to sift through and dump garbage onto people for a living.