Beware. Rant starting.
The US Postal Service has been in my twitter stream too
often in the past weeks. First, they announced that they were not going to
deliver mail on Saturdays. They are suing Lance Armstrong and then recently
they announced the launch of a new line of United States Postal Service
clothing. At first I thought it was an Onion article, but apparently its true.
What!!!!!!!! The United States government, which is currently running a trillion dollar
deficit is getting in the clothing business!!!!!!! I think we all know where
this is headed! Eliminating one day of service and launching a fringe revenue
stream is simply shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic!
Is this really the long term plan the US Government has for an
agency that lost $16 Billion dollars last year and is projecting a loss
of over $20 Billion this year!
So the time has for the US government to get out of the mail
and package delivery business. As a new US citizen, I took the time to read the
Constitution and saw that I have certain unalienable rights. Among those are
the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I did not see anything
about the right to have mail delivered to my home and below market rates. Did I
miss something?
Lets face it. There is no need to have the government in the
mail and package delivery business. Fabulous companies like UPS and Fedex have
been built that really know how to do this. Amazon and Google are cooking up
ways to streamline same day and next day delivery. Do we really think the US
Postal Service is going to beat Amazon. Google, UPS and Fedex????? This is only
going to get worse. Those guys will keep getting better and siphon off the most
profitable parts of the business until the USPS is left with delivering mail to
rural areas and under market priced bulk mail from direct marketers.
Not only does the USPS face impossible competition. It’s
core business is shrinking ( first class mail is down 25% from its peak) and will eventually go away. Email, text, skype,
social networking are how we communicate today, not letters. If you want to
send me a birthday card, send me an electronic one. All my creditors want to
bill me online and I want to pay online. I read my magazines on my iPad so my
Sports Illustrated is no longer on the
US Postal service critical list.
Now, I know that seniors are not going to be happy. They
want to get mail every day and doing business online is less natural for them.
But if the US Postal service is counting on them as their core market, I have
further bad news for them. There core market is dying!!!!! Literally.
I am not advocating that we shut the US Postal service down.
I am advocating that we sell it! A private company can deliver mail at market
rates. If you want delivery on Saturday, you can pay for it! If direct marketers
want reliable 6 day delivery, they can pay for it. Can someone forward this
blog on to some enterprising investment bankers! Let them run the numbers and I
will help put the pitch deck together. Can one of my Democratic friends get us
an appointment with Obama and Harry Reid? I know I can make this sale!
I have to say that I am a little uncertain on how US Postal
Service accounting works. It does not take traditional taxpayers dollars, but
they borrow money from the US Treasury. So, I can’t see how we are not on the hook
for this. Worse than this, I have a feeling the US Postal annual deficit is not
included in the total US Deficit numbers we see regularly. I feel we are $16B worse off
than the $1089B that was officially recorded.
Some of this is written, tongue in cheek, but the concept is
serious. I know that we can’t address the trillion-dollar deficit by saving a
few billion per year on the Postal Service. But if we can’t come to grips with
terminating government departments that are no longer needed, then what hope to
we ever have of balancing the budget.
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