http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/25/news/economy/postal-service-senate/index.htm?iid=SF_E_River
Not surprisingly, The Senate on Wednesday passed a plan to save the struggling U.S. Postal Service. This that could save thousands of jobs and 100 mail processing plants now slated to be closed or consolidated next month.
As we talked in class, The Postal Service in the United States is facing much challenging from its private competitors. Without help, the Postal Service would otherwise cut Saturday service, delay mail delivery and close hundreds of postal processing plants and post offices, triggering thousands of job cuts nationwide.
The House has yet to take up a different bill to reform the Postal Service. And this Senate bill, offered by members in both parties, forces the Postal Service to ease off part of its plan to slow down the delivery of first-class mail, the kind of mail that most consumers use. The bill makes controversial changes, including cuts to workers' compensation benefits, as well as a transition from door-to-door delivery to curbside delivery in some areas, such as suburban neighborhoods. The Senate bill also prevents the Postal Service from cutting Saturday delivery for two years.
It is surprising to me that the operation of Postal Service doesn't use tam money. It is, by law, an "independent establishment" of the executive branch. The profit in postal service has be sucked much by private companies. Treasury loan only cannot save its life, some proper reforms are still needed.
6 comments:
It seems that, in practice, that there is little difference between the United States Postal Service, and SOEs in socialist countries. It stays afloat not because it a capable of turning a profit, but because the government is keeping that way, largely for the sake of all of the jobs it provides. This raises the question of whether saving the USPS is worth it, or if we should just let it be phased out as it cannot compete with privately owned courier services. For now it seems that that jobs of those who work for the USPS are worth more to congress than the free market. This is, however, not necessarily a bad thing.
I think it will get phased out. If you need to ship an item, you use UPS or FedEx....USPS is used primarily for documents (I believe). You can literally scan any document into an email and you can fax anything directly to an email.....USPS mis inefficient and costing US money. HOWEVER I do not think this is the time to let it fail....we need CC to go up and cannot afford for more people to be out of work....as far as USPS goes, I give it 20 years at the most until someone buys it, privatizes it or it disappears all together.....
I agree with both of the above comments. The USPS is really not that useful, but we definitely need to keep it the way it is in order to keep thousands of Americans employed.
If we put the same resources used to keep the postal service afloat into infrastructure and a database, typical mailing could easily be replaced by online mailing and would greatly reduce our paper consumption. As mentioned before there are already well established mailing companies for packages like Fedex and UPS
The decision of whether or not to let the Postal Service is definitely a difficult one and has many political implications. Unemployment is one of the largest ones with neither party wanting to say they caused a great amount of it by allowing the postal service to fail. It will be interesting to see what happens.
The United States Postal Service should reduce its costs and reorganize just like nearly every other business has in the United States over the last four years. The United States Postal Service focus on becoming profitable changing the business model to adapt to the way mail is used today in society just as the thousands on businesses that have changed with the rise of the internet. Jobs should not be any concern of the the United States it should the delivery of mail to everyone one in the United States.
Post a Comment