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To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (1569)	2/10/2013 10:59:38 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 3363

That is a great article, thanks for posting it. If you privatize the postal service, you would wind up with another UPS or FedEx. The PS would lose its special character, something that, as the article says, urban customer often don't appreciate but rural customers certainly do. And they would appreciate it even more in hindsight if it was privatized because they would find that their postal rates would soar (as would many urban customers, although not as much), and I daresay the service itself would suffer as headcount got crunched and profitability rather than service mandates would be focused on. I would have bolded the following two paragraphs as well as the ones you bolded: The millions of parcels that the Postal Service delivers reliably and at low cost provide a salutary check on the pricing policies of FedEx and U.P.S. Wonder why the lines at the post office are so long? It’s because it still provides a service at a cost no rival can match. (Moreover, the agency already works with FedEx and U.P.S. to keep mail delivery affordable. In hundreds of cities and towns, it delivers the “last mile” parcels that FedEx and U.P.S. transport through their hub-and-spoke airborne networks.) Relatively few city dwellers go to the post office to pick up their mail, but in countless hamlets and small towns, the local post office remains a vital community center. For millions of workers, including veterans and African-Americans, a job at the post office has been a ticket to the middle class and has provided a pension and medical care to retirees. The Postal Service is the country’s second largest civilian employer, after Walmart. I agree that Congress should keep its mittens off of the USPS--if they had not mandated that $5.5b payment, it would not be in very much financial trouble today, even with the dropoff in first class mail, although they would still have run far smaller deficits and need some restructuring. But it would have been far more manageable and would not have needed nearly as many job cuts. I like this description very much-- In 1899, Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith called the post office the “greatest business concern in the world.” He had it wrong. The post office is a public service with a civic mandate central to American business, society and civic culture — not a business. But if it is to survive, Congress must allow it to start acting like one.