RedRunnersly

You don't like the fact that when you put a piece of paper into a box outside your house, it goes to where your scraggly handwriting told it to go? Because that's also the government. And I don't know about you, but it works every time.

Hey, I'm glad you brought that up! Because the complexity of USPS debt structure is actually a great example of the move to privatize vital government services without acknowledging what is lost in the process. See these sources that explain it better than I can:

http://www.deliveringforamerica.com/infographic-the-truth-about-postal-finances/ https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume https://about.usps.com/news/testimony/2016/pr16_pmg0121.htm

TL;DR: USPS debt is actually from a Bush-era mandate that it prefund its retirement obligations, obligations that in many cases will not be paid for 15 to 20 years. This is an abnormal expectations, but, one that will also even out within due time.

In short, it is inflated as a matter of policy. But why? Well, many assume that various groups putting pressure on the Federal government to privatize basic services saw the USPS as their white whale. If it come down, any agency could. I don't want to get into territory where I can't prove someone's ill intentions without evidence, so I won't. But what I will do is think for a moment why a subsidized postal service has a particular kind of social value, even if it loses money.

First off, delivering information is expensive and requires an infrastructure. Infrastructure, though, gets more costly depending upon how far a destination is from a major population center and any geographic obstacles. So, given fixed costs, there is very little market incentive to deliver mail to rural areas that are too far out, meaning that, if left to the market, certain communities would have never developed a basic information infrastructure that connected them to the rest of the republic.

Now, you can make all kinds of arguments about individual choice and everyone makes a choice about where to live. Fine, but what I am more interested in is how the information infrastructure that is the USPS impacts commerce. What is an industry that depends upon pulling resources from these rural areas that a private mail system would be loathe to serve? Mining and energy extraction, a very lucrative business indeed. Yet, in order for some of the basic administrative functions of energy extraction to happen, there has to be communication between the field site and a central headquarters. Payroll, bookkeeping, basic correspondence, and small-scale supply exchange, rely upon a stable infrastructure that moves messages around. Sure, a mine operator or oil extractor could have set up their own system of couriers, but that is much more expensive than relying on a nationwide-network of post offices that is already built to facilitate the exchange information in a predictable way.

So then, discussions that begin and end at "debt" miss a crucial point: that there is a broader social value that is extracted from the system, one that, in the case of public goods, rarely comes back to the government coffers, but forms a foundation for a nearly unimaginable range of productive activities.

How do you like Temple, compared to UW-Madison? It's a lot of first generation students, right? So do you feel like you are really putting your money where your mouth is?