Post Office Loses $5Billion

No normal business can lose $5 billion and have the management stay intact and have no cohesive plan for turning things around. But then the United States Post Office is no normal business. Actually, despite being dressed up in capitalist cloth, it really isn’t a business at all. It is a government agency and as a government agency the USPS is subject to lots of rules and regulations and accounting procedures that private enterprise never encounters. For instance, what business would be required to deliver its service to every spot in the United States at the same cost. A letter from my office to the most isolated spot in the fifty states or a letter sent next door costs the same 44c. Package rules and rates and classes of service have to vetted through a postal rate commission and deny the USPS the nimbleness to respond to competitors. Postal accounting makes pension benefits to employees far more expensive in current years than would be the case for private business. Labor negotiations are complicated because of the political influence of the postal unions. The USPS is forbidden from entering allied businesses that would be a perfect match for its paper delivery service. And marketing anything else to the USPS’s 320 million subscribers is forbidden. The USPS must retain money losing operations and is unable to expand into moneymaking ones. Seeing how profound the political constraints are that have produced this loss it seem amazing that the loss is only $5 billion. But then, losses and all, the Post Office will always be around. Boxed in by regulation, the USPS is the perfect whipping boy, illustrating the right’s belief that government is wasteful and the left’s that without government subsidies there will be vastly more unemployment and small towns in Kansas will be forced to do without mail service. Any agency that so well satisfies the agendas of both sides of the political spectrum will have a long, if not very successful, future.