Postal Service of the Future
Conventional wisdom seems to be that the financial difficulties of the Post Office are due to the rise of email. The Postmaster General noted this himself as he announced the end of Saturday delivery. But to only look at competition from email is to miss the larger ideological picture -- namely, that privatizing USPS has been a goal of market absolutists for decades. The real "crisis" faced by the PO is the absurd requirement, set by Republicans in Congress, that the agency fund retiree benefits for the next 75 years -- paying for future employees who haven't even been born yet! This article on Alternet provides an overview of how the service is under attack. Never mind that the Postal Service isn't taxpayer-funded; privatizing it is still part of the Cato Institute's agenda. It seems obvious to me that replacing USPS with a patchwork of private mail delivery companies would be an unmitigated clusterf#ck. Believe it or not, the private sector is not always the most efficient (see: health insurance).
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February 20th, 2013 - 12:25
More fuel for your fire: The 5 million social security recipients will have to arrange for direct deposit on March 1st. Arguments for are cost savings and safer delivery (a lot of paper checks are stolen). It costs over $1 to print a check and even the postage at reduced rate is a huge amount of money monthly. So less and less for postmen to do, except go postal while the other services charge far more for same reliability level of service . USPS is not traded on stock exchange… get it? Neocons are never happy unless cash trickles uphill.
February 20th, 2013 - 17:02
I didn’t notice the little dog until the last panel. Just about spit out my milk when I spotted it.
February 22nd, 2013 - 10:12
I’m not going to open them now or ever, so maybe somebody could tell me whether all those catalogs I transfer directly to the recycle bin every day contain anything of value. At least, though, they have young women on their covers, which is more than I can say for the almost daily crap load I get from the AARP.
Oh, and if for any reason you send a letter to Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe (pissing upstream so to speak), ask him why he doesn’t simply raise the standard mail (commercial) rates. That alone could make the service solvent, not to mention making life easier for me and my local garbage collectors.