U.S. Post Office proposes rate increase -- and "invents" a new gimmick (1 Viewer)

[Brad Porter]

Just out of curiousity I looked up the rates for the Royal Mail. Having to convert dollars to pounds and ounces to grams made it more annoying, but here's a quick result:

US 1 oz/39 c = 21.2 p
US 2 oz/63 c = 34.2 p
UK (2.12 oz = 60 g) 32 p
US 3 oz 87 c = 47.3 p
UK (3.53 oz = 100 g) 49 p
US 4 oz 111 c = 60.3 p
US 5 oz 135 c = 73.4 p
UK (5.29 oz = 150 g) 68 p

So for an equivalent weight it is about 10% to 15% cheaper send something first class in the UK, BUT they don't provide a 30 gram classification or as much granularity in their rates so most of those wankers are overpaying for sending lighter materials. The price for sending up to 60 grams as second class mail is 23 p, which is just slightly more than our first class mail rate for 28 grams of message.

I don't have data on the volume of mail that they deal with, but it wouldn't take much arguing to convince me that the USPS handles a much, much higher volume of mail. Having 800,000 employees makes that burden a little easier to bear.

Brad

 

[ChristopherDAC]

United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, reads in part : No other section mentions roads. Therefore, insofar as your roads are paid for by the Federal Government [which they are, in large part], and in pursuance of an enumerated power [a little trickier — parts of the Interstate Highway system are counted as military fortifications for budget purposes], they do in fact belong to the Post Office. As for postal carriers, I fail to see how the Government paying its own employees to perform a useful service is "tantamount to welfare", while the Government hypothetically paying your employees to perform the same service would not be. One cannot directly compare parcel carriers, such as UPS and FedEx, to the Postal Service. Parcel Post was only introduced about 1900, and has only ever applied to a restricted class of items ; for everything else it has always been necessary to arrange freight transport, and the fact that these companies allow you to get everything on one waybill instead of having to deal with the railroads to get it to your city, and local draymen to bring it to your home or shop, represents an advance. I will bet that you recieve mail to your home much more frequently than you do express packages, and it is this fact which allows the express carriers to maintain a much smaller infrastructure than the Post Office. As for subsidies, I have been saying all along that the Post Office is — or should be ; Congress has funny ideas on this score nowadays — "subsidised", and properly so, to the extent that the Federal Government pays the expenses for it to exist, because without that existence the selfsame Federal Government cannot do its job. As a matter of plain fact, when Charles I of England first permitted the Royal Mail to carry private letters for a fee, it was with the intention of reducing the expence to Government occasioned by having couriers criss-crossing the country without much to carry most of the time. If you threw the burden of carrying Government communications onto private contractors, two things would happen. First it would become a centre of graft and waste almost immediately, which is the reason the Civil Service system was created in the first place. Secondly, due to the lack of co-ordination, it would become very expensive and unreliable, very rapidly. As it is, a letter committed to the Postal Service almost always reaches its destination within the contiguous US within 4 days, Alaska or Hawai'i within a week. There is, in fact, no advantage at all to be realised from your proposal, except to you personally, and I'll thank you to abandon trying to enrich yourself at my expence.

 

[MarkHastings]

Christopher, I will also add to that and mention this...Imagine if the USPS was privatized and not run by the government - Now let's say your tax refund was stollen from your mailbox. What would/could you do about it?

I guess, if they captured the guy, you could go to court and fight him and pay lawyers to try and win against his shifty lawyer, etc.

The fact that hundreds and thousands of $$ run through 'easily accessible' mail boxes every day, I am glad that the governement protects each and every one of them.

You so much as tamper with my mailbox and it's a federal offense. And it also keeps "Solicitors" from touching your mail box. If a non-governmental employee puts something in my mailbox, I can get them into a lot of trouble.


MAN! Imagine if we could do that with email boxes.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

That's why I always like to pay for eBay purchases and so forth with Postal Money Orders. Not only are they better than bank cheques for negotiability, but tampering is a federal crime … it'll get the Secret Service and the Postal Inspector after you! I don't know which one is scarier.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Not just for budget purposes. The Interstate Highway lane widths, overpass heights and other specifications were originally based on the needs of transporting troop carriers, tanks and missle transporters/launchers quickly between states in the event of national emergency. The initial plans for the system also envisioned building fallout shelters into the concrete and rammed-earth beneath overpasses and exit/exit ramps. The whole concept did have a military component from the start and there was good reason for funding part of it through the DoD.

As for the "welfare" comment - I worked, and damned hard, for the USPS for a couple years. I was injured on the job due to the negligence of home-owners more than once, and twice involved in vehicle accidents caused by other drivers. The second one nearly killed me when my jeep flipped over three times after being clipped by a hit-and-run driver who had come around a blind turn partly in my lane. I left the Postal Service shortly after that incident a left the snows of New York for the sun (and hurricanes) of Florida a few months later. I was not on "welfare" and I hope the ignorant, insulting and economically illiterate person who suggested that I was is man enough to return to this thread and offer the apology that is due to everyone who works or has worked to earn their pay at the USPS.

Regards,

Joe

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Granted that road-buliding in history has mostly been oriented to military uses ; the famous Roman roads were built to expedite to movements of the famous Roman Legions, and generally by the legions themselves (the latest military use of these roads I am aware of is in the Israeli Negev campaign of 1948-9). On the other hand, Eisenhower's National Defence Highway System does not really impress the public day-to-day with its military character. More importantly for my purposes, there's no enumerated power of building military roads, probably because the Framers were not interested in encouraging people to think in terms of standing armies or "national mobilisation".

 

[Brad Porter]

Uh, prosecute the offendors for theft? If the gov't can make a federal crime out of private citizens consuming privately obtained forbidden drugs then why we they be unable to make a federal crime out of private citizens stealing privately delivered letters from your private property? And for the case of a tax refund, isn't that government property until you endorse it?

Brad

 

[Joey Skinner]

As a Rural Mail Carrier I'm pleased with the number of people sticking up for the USPS. The Post office does not take any taxpayer money; it relies only on revenue from postage. The recent price hike wasn't because the PO was losing money. It was to create a government mandated escrow account, with use of the funds to be determined by Congress at a later date.
I can't speak for other crafts but the Rural Carrier job can be tough and I resent Peter Burtch saying "carrier wages are welfare plain and simple". I've seen many trainees quit after a week or less often in tears because they thought the job would be easy money.
Back to the original subject of this thread. I think the forever stamp is a great idea mainly because it will simplify calculating postage for a letter.

 

[MarkHastings]

Ok, maybe I forgot about the governmental thing behind the tax check. I was just trying to think of a large check in my mailbox and since tax season just passed.

Anyways, the point was, if a large check is stollen from you, you have a much better chance of having the law help out if it was a 'Federal' crime and not just a plain old 'private property' crime.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

In any case, I see no reason why a system which works acceptably well should be overturned just because one person thinks he can succeed in making a viable business out of something everyone else has failed at in the past. I want nationwide, rapid, secure delivery at a flat rate. I'm not at all interested in breaking the system which provides that, in the hope of getting slightly lower costs, for a short time, in the local area. I know that taking quick profits by destroying something functional is all the rage in business these days, but I like to take the long view.

As far as Constitutional law goes, it is a reasonable rule of construction that, if Congress has an enumerated power to do something, its doing that thing is an excercise of the enumerated power rather than of an implied power to do the same thing.

 

[Peter Burtch]

So glad I pissed off the former postal workers and their kin . I suggest you read the following-

What Would Happen If the Post Office Had Competition? by Wilton D. Alston

 

[Henry Gale]

Peter,
Could you name the other countries with privatized postal service?

 

[Jimi C]

Brad I dont understand whos forcing you to use USPS. Just send all your letters using DHL, FexEX, or UPS. Its your money spend it how you want. You could probably mail a letter anywhere in the Cont. US with DHL for around $7. Im all for you doing that. If you dont want mail from USPS just get rid of your mailbox.

I wish my life was so stress free I had time to complain about things like the USPS. You must be a college professor, I hear those people bitching and complaining about the most inane things and I think, thats what I want to do for a living.

 

[Chris Lockwood]

Can anyone cite some cases where someone was prosecuted for taking a piece of mail from someone else's box or "delivering" something there without being a postal employee?

Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it gets prosecuted.

I can just imagine our local post office (which I think is run by the Keystone cops, the worst I've ever seen) reacting to this- they can't even deliver mail to PO boxes correctly. I've had several properly-addressed checks returned to the sender- it got so bad I had to get another box in another city just to get the checks delivered. Yet stuff not addressed to me gets delivered to my PO box all the time.

I'm not talking about the whole postal system, just our local incompetent one, where the rules seem to be different than at other post offices.

 

[Patrick_S]

This thread is over two years old.

I cannot be the only one who thinks it is strange that a person would resurrect a thread that has been inactive for two years just to state how glad he is others didn’t like his post and link to an article that is over a year old.

On second thought I’ll take back the strange comment. Pathetic is a better description.

 

[betooz]

Patrick, I think I will chime in as well. Some people in this thread seem to think the USPS operates to make maximum profits or a profit at all. Here is news for you, they don't, their aim is to break even. Pretty tough to do no matter what company even close to their size aspires to with all the variables involved. While I am not completely satisfied with the USPS, I have had a hell of a lot better consistency from them than ANY private shipping company. Especially Fed Ex Ground, the fscking WORST carrier bar none! Yes, the price of stamps rising can be annoying, but also totally understandable. Guess what, the PO sells 1 or 2 cent stamps so what you have previously bought is not worthless. The latest book I have must be those always good ones as they say first class and have no monetary value printed on them. Guess what else folks. I now have to mail maybe 2 letters per year. When I do need to send some media, I am perfectly happy with the service. For under $5 I can send between 4.7 GB and 800 GB worth of data anywhere in the country which will be delivered in a couple of days for about $5? With those figures Iron Mountain has been screwing my employer and tens of thousands others forever. Maybe some other private company can match their consistency and SLA's for less money and make a huge profit. *rolls eyes* With e-mail, fax machines, SFTP, inter-office mail... I realize this thread is old, but is anyone really bent all out of shape about this?

 

[Edwin-S]

There isn't a private business in existence that would want to provide the service that government mandated post offices supply. Most postal routes are money losers. If the postal system was privatized it wouldn't be long before massive, mostly rural, sections of the country wouldn't have any service at all, because the routes would be abandoned as being uneconomical to run.

Laissez faire privatizers have rocks in their heads. A federalized post office system has the same operational standards in every part of the country. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if the system was privatized? You would have a hodge podge of pissant private operators with varying standards of service and pricing policies. It would be a mess.

Also that comment about Postal Workers being tantamount to welfare recipients was just a beaut. I would like to see the person who said that carry 45 pound bags of mail around in every kind of weather condition for a wage that ranges between 36,500 to 48,500 and still call it welfare.

And, no, I'm not a postal worker, but I have a friend who is and he earns his money.

 

[Edwin-S]

You actually waited two years before posting a response? And the whole response consisted of noting your happiness over irritating postal and/or their relatives? Sad.

It's even sadder than the fact that I never noted the age of the posts in this thread before making my first post.

 

[troy evans]

So you're happy you upset a group of people who have nothing to do with what the Federal Government charges as far as postage rates? That's like blaming the cashier at McDonald's for the cost of the burgers. Maybe you didn't mean it that way. However, it kinda makes you come off like an ass.

 

[RobertR]

I addressed this in another thread. I don't buy the concept of the so-called "natural monopoly" at all. It's nothing more than a justification for bestowing government privilege on certain individuals using the power of the State.

http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_3.pdf