The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

There are various advocates for allowing the USPS to return to the banking business. They would put the exploitative check cashing stores out of business.<p>Ellen Brown&#x27;s has written a copy pieces advocating for postal banking.<p><i>What We Could Do with a Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure that Doesn’t Cost Taxpayers a Dime</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ellenbrown.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;what-we-could-do-with-a-postal-savings-bank-infrastructure-that-doesnt-cost-taxpayers-a-dime&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ellenbrown.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;what-we-could-do-with-a-po...</a> (2013)<p>This piece concludes by suggesting the postal service is being looted so its property portfolio can be sold off.

Something I don&#x27;t normally see discussed re privatization of US Postal Service is that it doesn&#x27;t appear to be a novel idea.<p>Singapore&#x27;s postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company[1].<p>The UK&#x27;s postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company[2].<p>Germany&#x27;s postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company[3].<p>Japan&#x27;s postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company[4].<p>I&#x27;m also yet to hear a convincing argument as to why the USPS enjoys a monopoly in first class parcel mail. That is to say, sure let&#x27;s keep USPS state owned &#x2F; public, but why can&#x27;t FedEx&#x2F;UPS&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;DHL compete with the USPS?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;S08.SI&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;S08.SI&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;rmg?countrycode=uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marketwatch.com&#x2F;investing&#x2F;stock&#x2F;rmg?countrycode=...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boerse-frankfurt.de&#x2F;equity&#x2F;deutsche-post-ag" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.boerse-frankfurt.de&#x2F;equity&#x2F;deutsche-post-ag</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;6178.T?p=6178.T&amp;.tsrc=fin-srch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;6178.T?p=6178.T&amp;.tsrc=fin-sr...</a>

Perhaps we should allow a private arm of the postal service to enter another area important for communication: internet service. As it is now, internet service is restricted to one or two providers in most regions. Prices are ridiculously high compared to the rest of the world. And broadband in the US is denied to many low profit areas. Yet we are in a time of COVID sanctions, schooling and working remotely that all rely on the net. Broadband supply needs more competition. The postal service is already delivering snail mail. How is it they were never tapped to run the internet in the US but instead we allow oligarchs to bleed us like Baron Harkonnen in Dune?

The USPS missed a golden opportunity in the 90s. Almost no one had an email address in the early 90s. The USPS was so afraid of email they refused to embrace it.<p>They could have been the email address of record for everyone in the US if they just set up a forwarding address for anyone who wanted it.<p>Heck, they could even do it now.<p>Imagine having a free foo@me.us email address that someone could only send to if they paid for it, like the way mail works now.<p>That is the business they should get in to, along with killing all the check cashing places by being a bank for unbanked like they used to be.

We are building a just-in-time distribution network on top of USPS (Bottomless - YC W19) We&#x27;re able to deal with their slowness because we predict demand in advance using data from a smart scale.<p>It&#x27;s quite astonishing how unreliable USPS is. We frequently see packages get routed to a totally incorrect part of the country, derailing shipments for several days.<p>Also, it seems like even USPS doesn&#x27;t know when their packages will arrive. The estimates they give are worse at predicting arrival time than just inputing distance into a simple regression!

Why does the postal service need to turn a profit? It&#x27;s a government agency. Are any other government agencies required to be profitable?

This is interesting timing, given the recent UPU changes that should help shore up USPS by reducing the losses they experience from international mailings. They estimate that this causes 400M in losses each year [0].<p>Though, overall, this has been a long arc of slowly trying different ways to gut or kill the program in the last ~40 years.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailingsystemstechnology.com&#x2F;article-4596-The-US-Remains-in-the-UPU-but-Changes-Are-Ahead-in-2020.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailingsystemstechnology.com&#x2F;article-4596-The-US-Rem...</a>

One of the most memorable passages from Cliff Stoll’s “Silicon Snake Oil” was about the reliability of snail mail. How you could scribble a person’s name on a postcard, mess up a lot of details, and it still manages to get to them.

Postal banking works really well in the countris in which it exists.<p>The best way to help USPS is to use them as your default shipping method: do so.

It seems like Koch wants to keep pushing consensus to privatize the postal service by weakening funding for it, which is, either intentionally or unintentionally, economically harming it. I&#x27;m on the fence over whether &#x27;kill&#x27; is the right word for this though.

It often feels like the social contract in American society is breaking down. Many of the rich elite in the US care nothing for the common person, and only adhere to their bubble of the wealthy and powerful. Crushing institutions that help people, or blocking the creation of new ones that might, are done so for ideological reasons even if practically speaking they might work or help people out.<p>At some point the wealthy and political in the US might have somewhat acted in the interest of the American people. But now it feels like almost every move is to the detriment of the average person.<p>If things continue like this, America is in real trouble.

Haven&#x27;t finished reading it, but I was not surprised that the Koch family is behind this special interest group.<p>The family has been fucking the US and world long before Trump was elected. They have a history of funding fake climate change science in order to push favorable legislation for the O&amp;G industry.<p>Anything that might benefit society (healthcare, social support, ...), they have fought against or funded a PAC to do their dirty work.

The US Postal Service should be funded like NASA. It can contract out to companies like Amazon - just like NASA contracts to SpaceX.

James Buchanan&#x27;s ideas and Koch money are the subject of Nancy MacLean&#x27;s 2017 book &quot;Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right&#x27;s Stealth Plan for America&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;30011020-democracy-in-chains" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;30011020-democracy-in-ch...</a>

Why can&#x27;t the US Gov bail out the USPS like big banks?

Getting rid of the USPS has tremendous national security implications. It&#x27;s a &quot;network&quot; that doesn&#x27;t rely on the internet.<p>Imagine we had to deliver a vaccine to everyone within a week. The USPS knows everyone&#x27;s address and where people live. They would be the go to institution to do this.

Skimmed this long PDF after getting clickbaited by the headline and it begins with the premise that without the USPS, we would be left only with email<p>&gt;The federal agency plays a crucial role in U.S. supply chains, commerce, and basic communication—which email simply cannot replace—by processing and delivering nearly 500 million pieces of mail on an average day.<p>But I did have a number of questions like,<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be bad if we abolished the post office since there&#x27;s always been one in my neighborhood?<p>Why does this person have a particular issue with a quasi-governmental agency that is a rounding-error in the federal budget? What about the trillions in defense and deficit spending?<p>Isn&#x27;t 90% of what comes to my mailbox spam that I just forward on to the landfill?<p>Do most other countries have a public postal service? Why or why not.<p>Don&#x27;t I avoid the post-office at all costs unless there&#x27;s an automated kiosk that happens not to be out of service?<p>Why is this on Hacker News?

The amount of narcissism these people (the Koch&#x27;s, for example) have is just astounding. If you&#x27;re a billionaire, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for why you even care about the post office? Why are these people so hell bent on hurting people to feed their own narcissism?<p>The USPS could be improved but struggles primarily due to active efforts to kill it off. But it&#x27;s a wonderful idea of a service that definitely should exist and be improved. What&#x27;s next to kill off? Libraries? Public schools? The USPS, libraries, public schools provide basically guaranteed service to anyone, anywhere. They&#x27;re wonderful institutions. Are they perfect? No. But very few institutions are, and these provide a helpful service to people. We should focus on improving them instead of spending so much money to kill them.<p>I&#x27;ve learned that the USPS has free package pickup since someone is basically guaranteed to be in your neighborhood every day, which has been a wonderful service during this viral breakout. By having USPS pickup my small packages, it keeps me out of their stores away from other people and employees. I simply purchase a label online and schedule the free pickup, next day if it&#x27;s a weekday. It&#x27;s a minimum of $11 for UPS to come pickup your package at a residential address, even if they&#x27;re already coming to your address for another delivery that same day.

I can&#x27;t imagine the number of tons of paper and c02 we would save the planet if we got rid of it. All they do is deliver spam that&#x27;s thrown away. I fully support selling it off to private companies.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;facts.usps.com&#x2F;table-facts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;facts.usps.com&#x2F;table-facts&#x2F;</a><p>From those figures it looks like &gt; 90% of the USPS throughput benefits the marketing operations of private companies and scammers.

It&#x27;s funny how it&#x27;s painted as malice and conspiracy, while the arguments on the other side are grounded in research and theory. The Kochs are the left&#x27;s Soros conspiracy.

I can imagine a future without the USPS. A future where I don’t have a weekly chore of sorting through the spam to decide which to throw away and which to recycle.<p>And a future where I don’t have giant boxes “delivered” into my tiny mailbox that could fit maybe a stack of 25 envelopes.<p>And a future where 20% of packages don’t arrive.<p>I can see why people want to avoid this.

I would say that losing to China so that it is cheaper to post from China to USA than from local to USA is a big deal. If they can get it cheaper than DHL, but slower and still hold onto the great ride of goods moving ... Just if

I hope the billionaire is successful. For some reason every other courier that delivers to my address manages to bring my deliveries right to my doorstep - UPS, FedEx, DHL, Amazon, GrubHub, local pizza restaurants, etc. all manage to enter my apartment complex, locate my unit, and leave my items right at my door. The only exception is USPS, which consistently leaves a slip in my mailbox pretending that they &quot;had no access&quot; to my apartment, even though the gates are wide open during the daytime when they arrive. Instead of delivering my items, every time I have to drive several miles to the Post Office the next day, mask up for Covid, and wait in the long line to retrieve my packages.<p>Every aspect of my experience with USPS is dissatisfying - they can&#x27;t be defunded soon enough.

The USPS&#x27;s primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service. That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS, or hand-delivered (in the case of really valuable stuff).<p>See:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidesources.com&#x2F;outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidesources.com&#x2F;outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-of...</a><p>The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. There needs to be significant value that others cannot meet. The reformation that is needed is being blocked.<p>For example, how about allowing me to pay $5 a month to not have you deliver crap into my inbox? Or to fully digitize the process, so I don&#x27;t have a recycle bin full of crappy products, alumni magazines, and pizza coupons that I don&#x27;t need or want.<p>Oh. And stop selling my data to third parties as well. Looking at you NCOA database.

Having lived in four different US states and in a number of European countries (currently resident in Germany), all I can say is good riddance.<p>USPS is by far the worst mail service I have ever encountered. It&#x27;s so bad that there&#x27;s absolutely no doubt in my mind that one can do a lot better, assuming one is allowed to compete. And even though they proudly say they receive NO money from the federal government, they do receive subsidies in the hundreds of millions.