Call for help: Postal chief says agency crashing: "WASHINGTON – The financially strapped U.S. Postal Service will run out of money this year without help from Congress, Postmaster General John Potter warned on Wednesday. 'We are facing losses of historic proportion. Our situation is critical,' Potter told a House subcommittee. The agency lost $2.8 billion last year and is looking at much larger losses this year said Potter, who is seeking congressional permission to reduce mail delivery from six days to five days a week."
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The Postal Service says they will go postal if they don't get a bailout. Fred Pilot sent this latest example of institutional implosion. How about if the last institution standing in Western civilization turns off the lights?
3 comments:
As Philip Larkin liked to say justifying his support of Margaret Thatcher, " . . . if you want something you have to pay for it."
We have the lowest postal rates in the G7, to cover the biggest distances, the most dispersed suburbia and the largest chunk of outright outback, and then we act surprised when the agency runs a huge deficit.
If we don't have the political will to do something about this, maybe we ought to just privatize the post office. Perhaps we should do this anyway.
No way should the Post Office be privatized. If you want to use private services then use Western Union, FedEx, UPS, etc. The Post Office already contracts with many of these as well as airlines and other vendors for transportation and numerous other aspects of Postal operation. However, I would fully expect as much graft and corruption to occur in a privatized postal service as occurs in HOAs and every other institution that "privatized".
Perhaps it should be privatized with a temporary deprivatization provision in case the federal government is disabled in a catastrophe and is needed to help restore it. See "The Postman" starring Kevin Costner.
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