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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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If you mean the USPS scaling down, that's kinda had to happen. People send way less mail than they used to. Electronic communication has displaced a bunch of postal mail.
I just bought a sheet of forever stamps this week, and the roll they were replacing was IIRC 34 cent stamps. That's how long it was taking me to get through a roll.
goes looking for when I would have bought them
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/domestic-letter-rates-since-1863.htm
Yeah, those haven't been current in 22 years.
goes looking for mail volume numbers
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/first-class-mail-since-1926.htm
The USPS peaked in volume back in 2001. In that year, they transported 103,656 million pieces of mail.
Last year, they did 45,979 million pieces.
It can be characterized that way, but the person who did the gutting was a Trump appointee and he seems to have done it in a deliberately ham-fisted way. Should the postal service struggle with ballots anywhere in the country that will be taken as a sign of fraud, but the reality is they did a poor job of making changes whether they were necessary or not.
Edit: downvotes aren't from me. Yours is a perspective I can't refute, but what I have read says the post office would be perfectly fine if their budget stopped being raided.
Your post shows how little you understand the USPS.
A) It wasn't the scaling down of the USPS that is what Trump did. He appointed the head of the org, Louis DeJoy, who did a lot of specific acts that slowed down how mail was delivered. He got rid of over 700 high-speed auto-sort machines that were perfectly fine but out of date and then didn't order new ones. He cut overtime and lowered the opening hours of offices.
B) The only reason the USPS is having financial issues is because the Republicans passed a law (which many Dems also voted for because they are morons and the plan sounded good at first read) that said all pensions had to be pre-funded through death. That means for every person who works there and has a pension, let's say being paid $500/mo for the rest of their life, will require the USPS to have a fully funded account in the amount of $500/mo x 12 mo x life expectancy. They can't do like every other company on Earth with a pension and fund it over time either through profits or by an interest bearing account. That crippled the USPS because they had to divert all their profits. Before that they were profitable, but this stifled all growth.
C) Even with that, they finally came back and made $56 billion in PROFIT in 2022. Yes, in 2023 they had a loss of $6 billion, but the profit from 2022 helped them to not scale back.
D) USPS doesn't make most of their money on first class mail. The majority of their income is from package delivery ($32.4 billion) and from mailing advertisements ($15.9 billion) vs first class mail revenue of $24.5 billion.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2023/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2023-results.htm
The reason that they needed to be pre-funded is because the USPS was shrinking and is expected to continue to do so.
What happens with a private company that's shrinking or going under is that people who have a pension plan risk winding up without their pension.
With the USPS, it's a quasi-governmental agency. Strictly-speaking, the government isn't on the hook for the pensions...but it's a pretty good bet that if the USPS can't cover pensions, then USPS workers are going to be asking the government to cover it down the road. This ensures that it's the USPS that pays for it, rather than it running up a huge debt, filing for bankruptcy, and then dumping it on the taxpayer.
The bill required all pensions to be prefunded for 50 years. Even pensions for people who were at retirement age and couldn't possibly last 50 years, and people who have just started and might not stay long enough to qualify for a pension also needed to have a prefunded 50 year pension. That's ridiculous. No other government organization has this requirement, and no other non-government organization has this requirement. So why would the quasi-governmental need one?
Also, USPS was profitable in 2006. While maybe not growing, they weren't going under. This was purely a political move to turn a profitable USPS and make it crash so that private companies like FedEx and UPS could take over the role to make money. Bush Jr used scare tactics to get liberals to vote for this, like the arguments you are using. Thankfully, Biden repealed this law in 2022.