No, we live in a small town and we need our post office and we need our mail delivery. I would gladly pay fifty cents to send you a birthday card, and I remember when first class was three cents. They are trying to take our township trustees away from us. They are trying to take everything local away from us. They eventually want us to abandon our rural communities and live in cities so they can control us. We don’t have grocery stores or drug stores anymore. The people who live in cities get subsidized bus service. They make us out in the boonies pay 4dollars for gas. We are good people and take care of our selves and don’t commit crimes. If the Unions are a problem, get rid of them, like Ronald Reagan did with the flight controllers. Fedex and UPS are okay, but for just mail, I always liked the Postal Carriers. I think it’s a noble profession, at least out here in America. I don’t like to get credit card applications and stuff with my name and birthdate on it telling me I am old but can still buy life insurance if I act now, but I like getting fliers and catalogs and magazines. Remember how when we were kids and we didn’t go to school until we were six but got a lot of love and attention up until that time so that when we went to school in our little local schools we had little trouble learnng how to read and get along in society?

Off topic? Yes and no.

Some things are worth paying more for. Get rid of the DOE, and the other DOE, and the EPA, and HUD, and HHS, and the CPA and the FTC and about half of the USDA, and then talk about the Post Office. Last I heard, the Post Office wasn’t trying to tell me what to eat, what to think, where to live, what to do, how to spend my leisure time. Some government services and functions are desirable even for us conservatives. If bailing out the Post Office was a left-wing cause celebre, they would have done it. Instead they bailed out GM and Goldman Sachs. And they are still trying to bail out the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. What’s the budget for the CDC? And they not only can’t stop an epidemic, they can’t even identify one. After years of scapegoating the drug industry, the lefties bailed them out to the tune of $8o billion so they could get their guy in the White House. There are a LOT bigger and better TARGETS than the Post Office.

What an idiotic post, and idiotic idea. None of your three options has an validity, as you propose them. Get rid of the postal service unions, just as Reagan did with the Air Traffic Controllers. Fire their arse and get real workers to do the job gladly. Your second option is laughable. I live in a rural location. I will gladly pay .47 or even more to not have to drive to a location miles away, and with a skeleton crew to man it. How willing do you think the current regime would be to privatize anything when they are on a rush forward to have government control of everything.

As Ron Reagan said, there are legitimate roles for government. I believe that providing mail delivery is one of them.

the marketplace will take up the slack. Congress only needs to allow competition with first class postage and take away the USPS monopoly.

And folks, please, how many 1st class envelopes do you send per year? Maybe if you are in direct mail or marketing for a grocery store, but if you aren’t paying your bills on line you probably missed the 21st century roll over. And if people want a meeting place in their rural home town, we’ll subside the meeting place. It is a lot less expensive than govt salaries and pensions.

Just because something is allowed in the Constitution, it doesn’t mean that we must do that thing. The left likes to argue that if something is bad it must be unconstitutional, and we must not get caught up in the flipside to think that anything constitutional must be good.

There are great reasons for ending the USPS, but I think there’s one overriding reason we should keep it. That is, we need a reliable, government-protected way for government to communicate with the people. The Internet isn’t free to every home (and shouldn’t be), so we need a way for the courts, the IRS, and others to communicate with people, and for people to respond.

The USPS is the only way to do that that I can figure out, in a country larger than a city.

…and send it on it’s way, you know that it is a federal crime for anyone to tamper with it. That’s a good feeling. Now, we don’t do much of that anymore. Still, we ought to learn some things from wikileaks. Anyway, I just hope some of my patriot guardians out there aren’t junking all of their ham radios.

Just to clarify a few things and to respond to those who think “this is an idiotic post and an idiotic idea”.

1. I am not calling for the post office to be eliminated. As I said some of the services they provide are still valuable.

2. I understand that UPS and FedEx is more expensive than the post office for many services and that UPS in unionized just as the post office is. The difference is that the UPS union is working for a profitable company so although the wages and benefits may still be inflated due to the union, the company is still making money unlike the post office.

3. The idea that the post office is a “small target” and there are many more bigger things to cut is true. But what is even more important is that cuts need to start somewhere. We need to be careful not to fall into the usual message the left uses of “well thats only a few, thousand, million, or billion, so lets leave it and go after something bigger.

4. I understand that rural areas need mail delivery. Especially out west where there is s LOT of rural areas. Like I said I am not suggesting it be shut down. But every tiny township in the country does not need a post office. The county I live in in Virginia of 400,000 people has 39 post offices. Some less than 3 miles apart.

5. I really dont care if the post office runs at a profit either like some of you.. But I do care that it at least breaks even. If it does not it borrows money from the treasury (8.5 billion so far) that will either need to be repaid at some point or forgiven by the fed (aka taxpayer bailout).

6. The fact is if the post office was a private company it would be bankrupt (or be bailed out by Obama). It would not have an open-ended line of credit from the treasury.

Congress just needs to lift the monopoly of 1st class postage and the ownership of mailboxes. I’m not sure why people want to defend government monopolies. Plans have been in place for decades at the package delivery companies to move into this market, if Congress lifts the monopoly. Competition is good, monopolies are bad. Nobody is saying that you can’t use the USPS to send mail, just give the other companies the right to compete.

USPS is required to prefund benefits.

“As he officially took office, the new postmaster-general and CEO of the US Postal Service reiterated his commitment to work with lawmakers in Washington to claw back the $6.9 billion overpaid into the federal pensions system.”

“The groups, which included the APWU and NRLCA,said the USPS would have been profitable over the past four years – even with the recession and competition from the internet – had it not been forced to pay $5.5 billion a year too much into the civil service retirement system.

The letter called for the $50-75 billion surplus within the USPS pension fund to be used to cover future payments, and asked the President to order a recalculation of USPS payments into its pension funds.”

So it sounds like the USPS is a reality check canary in the coal mine. If government recognized total future liabilities like this we’d get a much different picture.

USPS getting bad rap with unfair comparisons to other agencies not recognizing their own liabilities?

No bailouts and allow FedEx and UPS to deliver the mail.

Maybe $0.47 is way to much to pay. We will not know until competition has a chance to drive the price down or up.

Remember $0.25 per minute long distance from that other government mandated monopoly?

What did competition do for that?