Congressman Bill Pascaral, Jr., has some very interesting thoughts about the Post Office. The articles has facts new to me. "USPS handles 47 percent of the world’s mail, delivering nearly 150 billion mail pieces annually. It delivers more in sixteen days than UPS and FedEx, combined, ship in a year. The agency has roughly half a million career employees spread out across almost 31,000 locations. Post offices are tucked into every state, across far-flung Native American reservations, and in remote protectorates. If it were a private business, the post would rank around fortieth on the Fortune 500. And you can send a letter from coast to coast for two quarters and a nickel—less than the cost of a candy bar."
And we like it. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 88 percent of Americans have a positive view of it. That’s higher than the approval ratings for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In Pascaral's view Congress has not treated the Post Office intelligently. The Post Office has a weird structure promulgated by Congress 40+ years ago. They decided it made sense to have a half-public, half-corporate governing structure to make it operate more as a business. Then, in 2006, Congress required that the Postal Service pre-fund its health benefit obligations at least fifty years into the future. This crazy rule has accounted for nearly 90 percent of USPS’s red ink since.
USPS was part of the Cabinet for many years; now it is not. Even today most Americans don’t realize that despite their reliance on it, USPS is not a part of the government in the same way as the Department of Agriculture or the Pentagon, and receives effectively no support from the federal budget.
Pascaral proposes a bunch of changes based on not considering the Post Office a business.
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