Who Killed the Postal Service?

The only thing that is causing the problem is the federal government has demanded the USPS pay vast riches into a special tax on them alone which the government is calling a "trust fund" for "future pension obligations". This is just a ransacking of the postal service's operating income by the feds. There is no trust fund, the money is not saved anywhere. It goes into the Treasury and is spent by the federal government the same year it is received. 100% of the postal service's financial problems are because of this plunder.

"Salaries and benefits make up 80 percent of the Post Office's budget. By comparison, FedEx spends 43 percent of its budget on labor, while UPS spends 63 percent, according to Businessweek. Why the disparity? As the magazine put it, "USPS has historically placed the interests of its unions first."<p>You can't simply compare the USPS with FedEx or UPS. Neither of the latter provide regular deliveries. How much would it cost FedEx to have a large enough workforce to visit a significant fraction of the homes in the US every single workday? For that matter, doesn't UPS and/or FedEx have an agreement where UPS does the final delivery of some of the packages, precisely because USPS has most people?<p>Without that comparison, that comment comes across as a gratuitous slam against unions.

Ben Gibbard, sadly.