In a 2003, I wrote a paper for the Financial Roundtable, entitled, “Creating a Customer Focused Postal Service.” Unfortunately, neither the Presidential Commission recommended nor PAEA created a Postal Service with sufficient commercial and operating freedom to do just that. Instead, the Postal Service is run like a government department, no different than the FAA or the National Park Service. What matters is how Postal finances affect the federal budget and not how the enterprise can be run to best serve Postal Service customers.
An editorial today on the deficit super committee, the New York Times illustrates why “quasi” should be removed from the descriptor “quasi-governmental” when describing the Postal Service.
Mr. Obama identified $570 billion in detailed cuts to mandatory spending programs over 10 years. If committee members actually looked at the plan, instead of dismissing it, they would find scores of useful proposals for savings: $31 billion in agriculture subsidies; $18.6 billion in Postal Service reform, including ending Saturday delivery; $27.5 billion in increased fees charged to lenders by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; $42.5 billion in higher health premiums and pension contributions for federal and military workers; $135 billion in less generous Medicare payments to drug makers.
Regardless of how one feels about continuing Saturday delivery, cutting Saturday delivery in order to balance the federal budget serves taxpayers and not customers. Because postal reform through the deficit committee focuses on taxpayers and not customers, not only do mailers lose but all other postal stakeholders including postal employees lose as well.
Now might be the time for mailers and employees to explore business models with the freedom from legislative and regulatory oversight to serve postage payers while still providing universal service. In doing so, they should find that remaining a “quasi-governmental” entity under tight regulatory and Congressional oversight provides no protection from the pain from which they thought remaining part of government would save them.
I have to wonder why postal customers, who so obviously value the Postal Service, are steadfastly against paying more for the service. Most of them are priced according to a CPI cap which has nothing to do with the value of the services they are buying. Talk about bureaucratic! You don’t hear them crowing for the Postal Service to charge them more, now do you?
I’d happily pay more for a subway system that worked better. Or a highway system that had bridges that I had confidence in. God forbid we raise the gas tax to pay for these things. We are better off bitching about it after a Metro train crashes.
Best example of a stupid government policy: free museums in DC. All the Smithsonian museums on the mall are free. As a result, every Spring basement guest rooms all over DC fill with annoying relatives enjoying a cheap vacation (and eating me out of Fruit Loops). How about charging $5 a head at the Air and Space Museum so that my sister Claudia and her low life husband Al would go somewhere else next April.
As many mailers as not do such a poor job of preparing mailings that they are sorted manually and/or make letter carriers spend more time handling them. But, if they are told to follow preparation rules and regulations, they can just whine about gubment regs and continue the sloppy mailings, and continue bitching about gubment.