If the Postal Service were run like
Congress, postal workers would only show up on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and
Thursdays — except when they were on vacation, which would be a lot.
The
Postal Service says it’s going to stop delivering mail on Saturdays. This won’t
happen until August, but the overseers of our postal workers in Congress are
already swooning.
Can’t
help it, responds Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe. Our postal service is
hemorrhaging money, he says, and we have to cut back. Cutting Saturday delivery
would save $2.7 billion a year.
I don’t know about you, but my mail consists mainly of bills, circulars, and requests for money. I can get by with five days of that instead of six.
Whoa!
Am I hearing right?
Listen,
if the Postal Service were run like Congress, postal workers would only show up
on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays — except when they were on vacation,
which would be a lot.
Postal
workers would repeatedly go overseas on fact-finding missions and come back
empty-handed. Empty-headed too, for that matter.
They’d
have to change their motto from, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of
night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed
rounds,” to, “Will deliver mail for campaign contributions.”
The
postal system today is under siege from the Internet. The volume of mail
handled by the postal service dropped 22 percent between 2007 and 2011. People complain about the Postal Service all
the time. But that’s largely because people these days complain about almost
everything all the time.
My
own experience with the Post Office has been excellent. The clerks at the
office I frequent are polite and helpful. The mail I send gets where it’s going
in a reasonable time. And my postman knows my name.
The
Postal Service is a strange, hybrid creature. It’s not quite private, but not
completely public either. It doesn’t get any money from Congress, but Congress
gets to decide how it runs its business.
It’s
saddled by our lawmakers, for example, with the obligation of setting aside
$5.5 billion every year for future retirees, an obligation that no other
entity, public or private, endures.
Meanwhile,
we have the cheapest first class rates in the English-speaking world.
A
first class stamp in Canada costs 63 cents. In the United Kingdom, it’s the
equivalent of 94 cents. Here, it’s 46 cents. And we complain about that,
naturally.
The
Postal Service is running about a $16 billion-a-year deficit these days. It has some ideas to close
the gap, beyond getting rid of the pre-funding of retirement benefits and
dropping Saturday delivery. It would like to reduce door-to door service in
favor of centralized neighborhood mailboxes, and run its own health care
system. But it can’t do all of that without Congress’s cooperation, which seems
to have gone on permanent vacation.
Sometimes
I think we’d be better off if we let Congress run the mail system and let
postal workers run the country.
At
least they’d show up for work.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org
