Trey Smith
Today we're taking a look at the article, The Postal Service Outrage, by Dave Johnson of The Campaign for America's Future. In previous posts, we looked at Bullet Points 1, 2 and 3.
Bullet Point #4: While required to break even, the Postal Service has to deliver mail to areas that are unprofitable for private companies to operate in. A letter sent from a small town in Alaska is picked up and transported across the country to a farm in Maine for 46 cents. While the Internet and recession have eaten into some of the Postal Services letter business, magazines, books, newsletters, prescriptions, advertising, DVD services like Netflix and many other services still depend on the Postal Service for delivery. And many people for one reason or another still send letters. In a democracy, these people are supposed to count, too.
In days of yore, the federal government required interstate commercial transportation carriers to serve small and rural communities. Well, those transportation companies didn't like that one bit. They wanted to cherry pick the routes they offered because routes in highly populated and/or popular areas tend to be far more profitable than those in less populated and/or less desirable areas.
The transportation carriers howled and howled. They swarmed Washington, DC with their lobbyists and the rest is history. If you live in the boondocks today and you don't have a vehicle, you often are shit out of luck! You can't catch a bus nor a train to anywhere. Even if your town has an airport, you no longer have any airlines that land there.
Greyhound used to come through South Bend and Aberdeen. No more. The closest Greyhound route these days is in Centralia...65 miles away!
Imagine if the USPS had operated this way from the very beginning. The course of American history would have been altered significantly.
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