Its loss last year alone, was $8 billion. Each year, the losses of the U.S. Post Office grows and grows and grows. The postal service is a Constitutional item, so we can’t just ’privatize’ it, but must live with it. How to get the Postal Service in the black? I think it can be done.
(1) Do its losses come from the fact that postal workers are unionized? Partially maybe, but I think the losses from unionization are small.
(2) Politicians can send mail free, and that is NOT a Constitutional item. Get rid of Congressional franking privileges, and let politicians send their nonsense at their expense, not ours.
(3) Junk mail drives me and the letter carriers nuts. The post office says that junk mail makes them money, but that has to be a fantasy. I get huge advertising every day, and the advertiser pays just a few cents for each one, which may contain many pages and cost them maybe 3 or 4 cents each to mail. This is profitable for the post office? Nonsense. Let advertisers pay the same as we pay to mail something. The first class rate is 44 cents for one ounce, and the junk advertisers send, is many time more than one ounce. Let them pay the correct price, and maybe the volume of mail will be cut by half, or the income will be triple or even quadruple. Stop the losses and utter stupidity. That may be impossible, since the postal service is run by bureaucrats, but maybe some iota of common sense may seep into their bubble brains.
(4) The latest idiocy requires that every mailman go to each mailbox, every day, even if he has no mail to deliver to it. Every mailbox has a bar code on it, and that bar code must be read every day, even if there is no mail to deliver. What must this cost?
(5) All the clocks have been removed from post office walls. Is this so that people waiting in line won’t know how long they have waited? What earthly reason can there be for removing all clocks from the walls of post offices?
(6) I have no idea of what the yearly rental of a post office box costs, but if it were raised by say $2 a year, would this be an additional few million in receipts?
(7) I do appreciate the fact that the postal service delivers to all areas, regardless of distance or population of the area, but isn’t it reasonable that an extra charge should be levied for mail taken to or from Hawaii and or Alaska? Wouldn’t that make a few million extra bucks a year?
(8) The flat rate boxes are a profitable thing, and a nice idea, but continually advertising them, since their presence is already known?
(9) Why not electric vehicles which can be plugged in at night? Starting a gas engine two or three times in a single block, is hugely wasteful, and my mailman has an average of two to three starters go bad each year, because postal regs require him to turn the engine off at each stop, which is ridiculous. The maintenance of gasoline powered little postal vehicles must be several times as high as an electric vehicle, not to mention gas costs, vs. electric costs to charge them.
(10) Some rules are so absurd as to be laughable. Locally, if I mail a letter addressed to a local address, it must go to Grand Junction, 60 miles away, and then be sent back to be sorted and delivered in the same town from which it was mailed.. Make sense to you? Not to me!
(11) Mail clerks handle passport stuff, which is not a Constitutional item. How much time does that take, and at what cost? Let the passport stuff be done at some other place.
The above are just a few suggestions as to how to make the postal service at least break even, and believe me, it could be done.
Another 428,000 new applicants for unemployment handouts this week. For 12 weeks, the count has been over 400,000. 9.1% unemployment? About twice that I am certain. David and Melissa are visiting me and their Mom this week, so they are off. It’s up to Morgen and yours truly. Morgen is doing fine, has a great personality like David and Melissa, and she fills the time slot that we never filled before she came aboard. Find all of our pictures by clicking on contact. You can access about 900 of my previous columns by clicking on ’archives.’
Looks like gold and silver reached their bottom early this week. I am willing to make a bet that a year from now, we will have $60 silver, and $2500 gold. Trees can be felled to print stocks, bonds, paper money, and even SLV and GLD certificates. Nothing beats holding real, beautiful silver and gold, which require no government to give them value. They have it all on their own…which means you should own it, if you will excuse the pun.
PLEASE, DO HAVE A HAPPY JULY 4TH, AND CELEBRATE THE FOUNDING OF THE MOST WONDERFUL NATION ON EARTH. JUST DO NOT CELEBRATE THE CURRENT PRESIDENT AND HIS DEMOCRAT SENATORS. WE’LL GET RID OF THEM, BELIEVE ME. (Michelle Bachman does not dress like Sarah Palin)