Of course they no longer call it the Post Office because that’s what everyone has called it since forever. (The idea for USPS probably came from the same brains that try to make us call cell phones “wireless”.)
The people who work at the Post Office do a pretty good job, and at least they go to work. Over in the UK, there’s talk of yet another Royal Mail strike. “Hmmm, mail volume is down, revenue is tumbling, we’re in a deep recession … I know, let’s go on strike!” Brilliant.
The Post Office over here is almost certainly going to try to stop Saturday delivery and shut 300 to 700 post offices which makes sense but, as Guts predicted a couple of weeks ago, the slow-class kids in Congress are probably going to butt in.
Sooner or later, they’re going to force the Post Office to raise postage on standard mail, what we used to call Third Class. That’ll have the same impact that raising taxes has: less (much less) revenue and fewer jobs … in the private sector, people like you and yours truly. But they’ll do it because they just can’t help themselves.
We direct marketers need the Post Office and businesses rely on it: NetFlix, for instance, and magazines, small package shippers. I still get all my bills through the mail and will continue to do so until they start hanging hackers, phishers and other cyber vermin. (Only idiots mess with the mail. There’s a whole separate police force dedicated to finding people who do that and they actually get the bad guys sent to the slammer.)
One way the Post Office could save a bundle is to get out of the health care business. At the moment, they (we, actually) are on the hook for an immediate payment of about five and a half billion dollars just for retirees’ healthcare with a hell of a lot more to come. It would make more sense to give employees a tax free $10,000 a year each and make them put it in health savings accounts. We could probably afford a group catastrophic care policy on top of that. But that’s not the way they did it in the Soviet Union, our current model of good government, so there’s no way we’ll ever do it here.