Should we shut down the US Postal Service, Email has destroyed its business model, and even deep cuts in personnel and facilities might not be enough to save it.

Back in May, I declared that the U.S. Post Service, a treasured American delivery vehicle in one form or another since 1775, had outlived its usefulness, a victim of email and its own bloated financial structure. I also wrote:

Another thing that is not going to happen is the prompt and thrifty dissolution of the U.S. Postal Service as we know it. There are just too many jobs -- the Postal Service has 563,000 employees -- and a shrinking but still vocal group of holdouts who insist they do not need a computer. Should we shut down the US Postal Service,

For them, we will waste years and billions, maybe trillions, of dollars on a barely breathing product. The Washington Post, +U.S. Postal Service,

It was no surprise, then, to see that Congress, apparently not wearied by doing almost nothing to address the national debt problem, has offered two plans to solve the Postal Service's deficit, which is $20 billion over the past four years, including $8.5 billion in the past fiscal year. The bipartisan plan kicks the can down the road for future elected officials to worry about. The conservative plan would solve the problem by, among other things, repainting the trucks. Federal Employees Health Benefits Program,

What was surprising was the proposal put forth by the Postal Service brass themselves: cut jobs, close post offices and withdraw from the federal health care and pension programs that they say do not meet "the private-sector comparability standard."

This is no small stuff.

According to The Washington Post, citing a notice sent to employees, the Postal Service wants to cut its current work force of 563,000 by 220,000 over the next four years. About 100,000 cuts would come from attrition, the rest by elimination.

In addition to its earlier announcement that it would like to close 3,700 post offices, the Postal Service wants to eliminate most Saturday mail service; take all of its current workers and 600,000 retirees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and put them into a cheaper plan run by the Postal Service itself; and forgo required prepayments -- $5.4 billion this year alone -- into its employee retirement plan.philadelphia inquirer,

Much of this would need congressional approval and would require the breaking of labor agreements -- not easy tasks. "The APWU will vehemently oppose any attempt to destroy the collective bargaining rights of postal employees or tamper with our recently negotiated contract -- whether by postal management or members of Congress," American Postal Workers Union President Cliff Guffey told The Washington Post.


Then there is the problem of public opinion. No one wants his or her post office closed. Here's what Daniel Deagler, writing on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website, had to say:

Last month, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe announced that the agency was looking into closing up to about 3,600 post offices. If the Postal Service were a business, there would be no question that many of them should be shuttered. Outside the Beltway,

But that's the thing: It's no more a business than the State Department or Department of Agriculture. Is the Navy expected to be financially self-sufficient? Is your local police department? Of course not. Taxes pay for government services, and mail delivery is a government service. …

This country has 3.79 million square miles, and in pretty much every one of them, the post office delivers six days a week. The 31,900 or so post offices create the network that binds the country together. Most are in small towns, and it is true that they don't bring in much cash. But they are the hubs of their communities, the place where the flag proudly flies. Quite often, it is the post office that make the town a town, and the people who live there think they're worth keeping open.

Every year, the U.S. government gives more than $30 billion in aid to foreign countries and $4 billion in subsidies to oil companies. Why shouldn't it give the U.S. Postal Service a few bucks to keep the post offices open in these American towns?

The Postal Service, chartered in 1971 as a self-supporting organization, is not a government department in the sense that State and Agriculture are, but Deagler has a point: Is financing your local post office -- 17 in the Bronx alone are targeted for closing -- something taxpayers should take on?



No, insists Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway:

USPS not only finds it difficult to react to changes in the market because of the political implications of the decisions that it makes, but it has no incentive to do so until it's absolutely too late, like it is now.

Consumers have found a way around that monopoly by essentially voting with their feet. Electronic payments mean that fewer people mail checks anymore. E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter mean that you don't need to send a letter or a card to stay in touch with friends and family. The World Wide Web, and now tablet computing, have made paper magazines somewhat obsolete. At this point, the USPS's first-class mail system is little more than a vast junk mail delivery system. …

Privatizing the Post Office won't prevent the changes in technology that are making mail delivery less relevant but they would allow USPS, or its successor, to respond more rapidly, and more creatively to those changes without having to please the political overlords on Capitol Hill. Privatize the mail; it may be the only way to save it.

While keeping in mind that, even with the personnel cuts proposed by the Postal Service itself, privatization would still leave 343,000 middle-class employees looking for work in a job-scarce economy, not to mention the ripple effect, I believe shutting down is long-term smart.

* Two highly developed and efficient private, well-paying package-delivery companies -- UPS and FedEx -- would pick up many of the people cut by the Postal Service.

* Junk mail would still find its way into our homes. It is too big a business to just disappear. And while most Americans appear to detest it, volume alone indicates it must be effective as a business tool. Someone would step in to fill that gap, but maybe not at 14 cents per piece.

* First-class letters (the 44-cent kind) would disappear. What documents and personal correspondence that must be hand-delivered could be done by courier services or the big delivery boys -- though at a higher cost, much like newspaper delivery.