GOP law lets Postal Service seek more rate hikes

Most Americans 30 years ago viewed the U.S. Postal Service - a quasigovernment agency - as reasonably efficient and reliable. More and more, however, the Postal Service has become much less so as conservative regimes seem to have done their damnedest to gut it. The ruling regime seems hell-bent on forcing the Postal Service to spend more to do less.

Contrast today with only a decade ago:

1) These days, mailing a letter takes longer.

2) Public mailboxes don't accept packages that they used to accept.

3) There's far fewer public boxes. (There's none within blocks of here.)

4) More mail gets lost or destroyed.

5) The Postal Service doesn't keep their post offices open as many hours.

6) The mail arrives later in the day.

And they do all this with more money! Amazing! Obviously they haven't been hiring enough personnel, because both public and private industry have been on a downsizing binge for years. And I doubt that mail carriers are getting rich either. So where does the money go?

It doesn't have to be this way, because things used to be much better. Government agencies can be reliable. But politics is politics, and the problems go right to Washington.

Part of the problem is that - on an increasing basis - real mail subsidizes junk mail. It costs far less for a corporation to send an ad than it does for a person to send a letter, even if the ad is many times as big. (I first discussed this scam in The Last Word no later than 1994, but it's only gotten worse.) Yet there's more junk mail now than ever. That's outright mismanagement.

Now the Postal Service - which just increased the price of a first-class stamp to 41 cents last May - has just announced it's hiking it to 42 cents this May. Why another increase so quickly? Well, it used to be that the Postal Service had to have hearings with the Postal Regulatory Commission before raising the rate. They had to actually try to justify the hike and at least make some attempt to show that they were running a reliable system. But - under a Bush-backed law that took effect in 2006 - the Postal Service now automatically raises the stamp price annually without even having to get regulatory approval.

You probably didn't hear anything about this law, because why would the Republican media want anyone to know? It's kind of like when the Republicans raised the retirement age and nobody knew about it.

This law might not be so bad if not for a couple not-so-little things: 1) Folks are already paying more for a stamp only to get less reliable service; and 2) the minimum wage doesn't go up automatically each year to keep pace with (whoosh...whoosh) inflation, so why should the cost of a stamp? Let's start indexing the minimum wage with inflation, then I'll take postal rate hike requests more seriously.

More proof the problem goes straight to the top? Recently it was discovered that the Office of Inspector General was illegally snooping at postal employees' medical records - prompting a lawsuit by 2 unions representing the workers. The OIG was obtaining the records from hospitals where the workers received medical care. The OIG told physicians and hospitals that they were required to submit the records and could not tell the employees.

So it's a whole big system that's sneaky, political, corrupt, and authoritarian. I've had problems myself, like when I filled out a survey I got from my congressman and the post office returned it to me torn in half. (Sounds like the old Soviet Union.) It's a shame we have to spend more for that nonsense. (Ironically, members of Congress get to send out these surveys and their shitty newsletters for free.)

(Source: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080211/postage_rates.html;
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/01/24/postal-employees-say-big-brother-is-watching-them)