Scott Spiegel

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The United States Postal Service is once again threatening to scale back service due to budget shortfalls.

Earlier this year the postal service warned that it would cut Saturday delivery if it didn’t get an emergency infusion of cash from the federal government to pay off its staggering debts.

Last week the USPS announced that, as part of a $3 billion cost-cutting plan to help it avoid bankruptcy, the agency planned to eliminate one-day delivery, such that all letters would be delivered in a minimum of two days, even if they’re only going next door.  To get your letter delivered by the next day, you’ll have to go to the nearest processing center and drop off your letter before final pickup, thus carrying out half of the mail delivery service yourself.

Complicating matters, the postal service expects to close half of its processing centers and reduce its workforce by 100,000 employees over the next few years through layoffs, attrition, and retirement.

The postal service has known about its financial woes for years.  Yet statist Congresses have forbidden it from taking effective action to right its situation.  Its current debt is a result of its failure to make $5.5 billion in annual payments to cover its insanely generous retiree packages.

Many USPS sympathizers insist we should do anything we can to preserve this great American institution.  Senator Susan Collins, RINO of Maine, has proposed the 21^st Century Postal Service Act of 2011.  Recently she wailed, “Time and time again in the face of more red ink, the postal service puts forward ideas that could well accelerate its death spiral.”

I say good riddance.

There are plenty of private, for-profit mail and shipping services that can do exactly what the postal service does—better, faster, cheaper, and more reliably—in part because they remain unencumbered by business-unfriendly postal unions, lavish retirement benefits, and redundant administrative functions.

I feel the same way about bailing out the post office that I do about bailing out my home city of New York’s metro service, which forever seems to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and in dire need of just one more blast of cash from Albany.  My recommendation: Don’t give them another penny.  Let the private market absorb as much of these failing public institutions’ business as possible, in order to facilitate the ultimate transition to complete privatization.  In the case of the subway/bus system, that means letting some of the overflow in transportation demand go to taxis, private bus/car services, rental/private cars, carpooling, bicycles, or walking.  It may mean a temporary, painful period of crowding and poor service in which the public clamors for—and finally gets—privatization of the metro service.

In the case of the postal service, it means that United Parcel Service, FedEx, et al. will pick up the slack of no-longer-delivered Saturday mail, and will carry out the next-day mail service the postal service no longer provides.  Companies and private citizens will expand their use of e-mail, faxes, direct deposit, smartphone apps, and online billing and payment to handle important, time-sensitive communications and functions.  This is what they’ve been doing anyway for the past two decades—which is part (but not all) of the reason for the old-fashioned, unenterprising USPS’s woes.

In a surprisingly clearheaded, unsentimental article in The New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal admitted, after describing a petition to save Saturday delivery that had appeared in her Manhattan building’s lobby, “I will not say whether I signed.  But I will tell you what arrived in my mailbox that Saturday: two credit card offers; a Linen Source catalog for someone who used to live in my apartment; a notice of a sale on running shoes; some coupons for 10 percent off on pizza delivery; three promotional letters about colleges; and a bank letter about changing terms on my son’s high-school checking account for 2012.”  (Evidently the Times let environmentalist Rosenthal off the leash to criticize the USPS because of the billions of pounds of wasteful junk mail distributed each year.)

For those who plead that the USPS is a great, democratizing institution that delivers a variety of important types of mail to underserved residents who vitally need it: The bulk of USPS’s costs these days are funded by mass market advertisers who get discounts for flooding our mailboxes with glossy flyers and brochures for high-end furniture, home decor items, and clothing.  As with so many instances of government involvement in the economy, the USPS chooses winners by subsidizing mail order companies to send us junk catalogs.

Critics of five-day-a-week service claim that, as an advanced nation, we can’t allow the travesty of not having Saturday mail delivery, which would slow business and render our communications system like that of a developing nation.

Nonsense.  As long as we allow for private enterprise to step in, we’ll be even more efficient and advanced than if the USPS had a greater role in our mail delivery system.  Even most Western European nations have privatized mail delivery.

Why should there be one near-monopolistic, government-controlled service that has legal prerogative to shut out private companies from central mail delivery functions?  Why should our mail delivery system constantly verge on bankruptcy?  What’s advanced about that?

After the USPS cuts Saturday service, the next logical steps are to cut: Friday service, Thursday service, Wednesday service, Tuesday service, and Monday service.



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Thanks to fierce lobbying by Congressional Democrats, the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the health care bill just passed on Tuesday with bipartisan support from (1) liberal senators, represented by Olympia Snowe from Maine, and (2) ultraliberal senators, represented by all 13 Democrats on the committee.

On Wednesday morning, GOP senator and fellow Pine Stater Susan Collins also announced that she was open to health care reform along the lines of the committee’s proposal.

Impressive as this Republican sweep is, you may recall how Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package received even broader bipartisan support last spring, inasmuch as it attracted the votes of no fewer than three Republican senators, including Snowe, Collins, and Arlen Specter, which of course means that the failure of the stimulus bill to do anything it was supposed to lies equally with Democrats and Republicans.  (Of course, Specter became a Democrat five minutes later, but right up until that moment he was planted firmly on the other side of the aisle.)

Snowe, like Collins, Specter, John McCain, and other liberal senators, has a reputation for magnanimously cooperating with the opposition party (the ultraliberals) in passing legislation that might otherwise abridge our liberty.  Legislators such as Snowe (L-ME) serve the valuable function of watering down such legislation to render its impact marginally less onerous on average Americans.

For example, Snowe opposes a “public option” in the health care reform bill—that is, unless private insurance companies don’t live up to arbitrary standards to be issued by the Secretary of Health and Human Services that will ensure such companies don’t get away with swindles like “earning a profit,” at which point the public option will kick in faster than you can say “single payer.”

It’s a shame that no other Republican congressmen will put aside their partisan differences and work with liberal and ultraliberal senators.  (Imagine how Obama would trumpet the expansive consensus of a tripartisan bill!)  As is, even some liberal senators such as Independent Joe Lieberman have expressed resistance to embracing the proposed legislation on the grounds that it will massively increase health insurance premiums for Americans—i.e., that it is self-defeating and crazy.

Some might quibble that the mere addition of one senator to a committee vote does not indicate the establishment of bipartisanship on health care.  Yet Snowe’s vote must signify a major shepherding of Republicans into the fold, in that Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has made a host of concessions on her behalf, such as slashing by 50% the penalty for individuals who don’t buy insurance, and increasing subsidies to people whom the bill mandates must purchase insurance (i.e., everyone).  Never mind that the tiny state of Maine receives the same number of votes in the Senate as California—Snowe’s Finance Committee vote is evidently equal to the vote of 13 Democrat Senators!

The mainstream media’s critical, analytical take on this latest development on health care has been: a hearty rah! rah! for health care reformers for clearing such a grueling hurdle in such a graceful fashion.

While we’re talking about hurdles, it’s instructive to peruse an internal memo released by the Finance Committee in early June, which proposed a timetable for moving legislation through Congress.  According to this starry-eyed agenda, the Committee would pass its bill by mid-July, merge it with the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s wildly different bill and send it to the Senate floor for a vote by the end of July, and merge this with the House’s even more wildly different bill and have legislation ready for Obama to sign by October 1.

So the initial round of passing the bill out of committee, the slam-dunk part of the process, was supposed to take a month—and took four.  The next two rounds—merging the Senate bills, then merging the merged Senate bill with the merged House bill—will be far trickier than the initial round.  These tasks are predicted to take two-and-a-half months—by the same people who were confident Obama would have already signed a health care reform bill two weeks ago.  Based on the Committee’s previous underestimates, by my calculation Congress should get around to voting on a final healthcare bill around September 2010—two months before a third of the Senate and all of the House are up for reelection by a public that opposes every plan they’ve seen out of Congress this year.

Now that the Democrats have secured wide-ranging approval among lawmakers for their bill, I recommend that they capitalize on this groundswell of support.  Let’s hope that ultraliberals can leverage the runaway momentum created by bipartisanship from the Snowe Party to ensure swift passage of their bill.