It's in the Mail

 

        Food for thought: I just returned from picking up the mail and, as I sometimes do, I chatted a bit with Trish, the 40-something lady who delivers and sorts our mail, She also makes home deliveries in the neighborhood of packages too big for the lockers at the mailbox kiosk. It’s really a building with several hundred individual mailboxes and around 50 larger lockers. Trish has delivered packages on Sundays from time to time. 

    She is unfailingly positive and outgoing although she works very hard at the job, since she picks up all the neighborhood mail at the central post office and then re-sorts it into our family boxes later. That said, while I don’t know how much she is paid, she works her butt off for it. I am more than pleased with our mail service and believe that national mail service should be something the nation does, not with profit as the first consideration, but with service foremost.

         This is especially true in the age of prescription drug delivery by mail, since an estimated 70 million Americans benefit from this as the primary way, they get the prescriptions they need.  We have heard a lot from the President regarding Postal Service revenue shortfalls. In his mind, if the post office doesn’t make a profit (or at least break even) then perhaps we should scrap it.

        This seems odd considering that he (Donald J.  Trump) was the beneficiary of about half a billion in untaxed, or grossly undertaxed, money from his father, Fred Trump. Trump senior built his real estate empire of low- and middle-income apartments with the aid of large sums of guaranteed government money provided to help builders meet the demands of the post war housing market. I repeat. No government help, perhaps no Trump empire which still provides a steady stream of rents as a foundation for the Trump organization.

         Using other peoples’ money has also become a way of life for Donald Trump. As of yet, unlike his father, he has never really paid it all back and turned profits from his efforts. He has, by recent estimate, about the same dollar value of debt in personal loans as that initial nest egg his father cheated to give him. Donald Trump has turned half a billion in free money into half a billion in unsecured personal debt. In the process, unlike the Postal service which is, for many, a critical government service, Trump really has done no one much good. 

       Pre-CoVid, his budgets ran huge deficits in 2017, 18 and 19. Apparently, economics isn’t his strong suit, a fact made clear by the horribly ill-advised tariffs he personally ordered. The cost just in increased and unbudgeted agricultural subsidies directly attributable to these tariffs would have funded the US Postal Service shortfall, using last year’s numbers, for about 3 ½ years. Read it again. We are giving, at most, 100,000  families an extra $30 billion or so because the President apparently learned very little in economics class at Penn, where he couldn’t get into grad school, having not been an honors student, according the  graduation program for his class. Now the clincher: Non- partisan Industry experts have calculated that the cost of these tariffs (the non- agricultural ones China retaliated with) have cost an annual average, nationwide, of about $850 per household. No, Jethro, he lied; China doesn’t pay them, you do. You know, just like Mexico isn’t paying for a wall? Multiplying this by some 128.5 million US households, yields $108 trillion. This alone would cover the postal service shortfall for more than 12 years!

        Putting it more simply, if every household in the USA paid $6 per month, with no increase in postal rates, the Postal Service would be self-sustaining. Taking another, user specific, tack, the USPS delivers about 66.5 billion first class letters annually. Adding ten cents to each would largely defray the operational shortfall. It is a specious argument to claim that USPS and other commercial deliverers do the same job. They don’t, simply because the mandate of the USPS is to deliver mail to everyone, which, in some cases, means to places other carriers simply refuse to service due to cost.   

        These are simply a few ways to overcome the USPS operational shortfall which Trump denounces. The truth is that he’d probably rather see the whole thing commercialized so his friends can make a buck at it. Appointing Louis DeJoy, a man previously heavily involved in “for profit” mail and parcel operations (and a Republican Mega-donor) to supervise the USPS was a first step, It also was aimed at using this supposedly independent and apolitical service to suppress voting by mail.  

We deserve better. Vote!