With all the dire warnings that the U.S. Postal Service will become insolvent unless Congress comes to the rescue, predictable and unhelpful clarion calls for privatization have begun to resurface.
One such call reportedly came from Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in chief of Forbes Media who said basically the USPS should be privatized before it needs a taxpayer bailout.
Forbes maintained that a for-profit enterprise could do a better job of delivering the mail.
He also reportedly pooh-poohed the idea that rural America would lose out under a private postal system, saying that if people there did not like it they could move.
Did the idea of providing universal service never occur to him?
In September,Postmaster General Pat Donahoe told Congress that the USPS would lose up to $10 billion by the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30, and that total mail volume is expected to decline by 2%, to approximately 167 billion pieces compared to last year.
The USPS missed its annual payment of $5.5 billion to cover retiree healthcare costs. Despite getting an extension to mid-November, the USPS still may not have the money to pay up.
The entire postal situation has created a good deal of uncertainty among mailers l most of whom are locked into their current mailing schedules.
The postal privatization argument should have ended back in 2008 after DHL, a subsidiary of German postal corporation Deutsche Post shuttered its U.S. operations because it couldn’t make any money here.
There’s also the increasingly strong argument that privatizing the USPS would strip the industry of its largest delivery system which is still quite necessary despite ever-growing electronic alternatives.
On top of that, privatizing the postal service would deprive everybody of the one apparently trustworthy government institution still left.
And that’s not likely to go over too big when a growing number of citizens are registering their discontent with a system that seems willfully out of touch with most Americans.
So this may not be the time to spout doctrinaire ill-informed privatization ideas
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