Watching the give and take among proponents and opponents of postal legislative reform has been fascinating. Proponents – and I’m one – have struggled to make the case that without a substantive redirection of U.S. Postal Service incentives, the USPS eagle is destined for extinction.
After all, this isn’t rocket science. Enterprises that work on a break-even cost basis have no reason whatever to minimize costs to maximize gains, since gains aren’t permitted. To make matters worse, try to find another $63 billion enterprise that’s prohibited by law from paying its CEO no more than $154,000 a year. Is it any surprise, then, to discover that the postal service suffers from an absence of common-sense business incentives?
For anyone who’s ever struggled to meet a payroll, you would imagine that demonstrating such a lack of incentives would make a convincing argument for change. When it comes to making such arguments within the federal legislative arena, however, you’d better think again.
Instead, lawmakers seem more enamored with the baloney being peddled by those who oppose postal legislative reform – such as United Parcel Service or the Newspaper Association of America – without questioning for a moment the motives of these naysayers.
There also don’t seem to be too many members of Congress who care to ensure that our nation maintains a universal postal delivery infrastructure. Nor do they think about how the disruption of this system would harm our economy.
No, like Scarlett O’Hara, they’d rather hold off thinking of such things to another day. After all, ignorance is bliss – even if the cost of such ignorance is a postal system that’s gone with the wind.
It’s no secret that some legislators have tried to label the 106th the do-nothing Congress. But with so much at stake, I fail to understand why representatives aren’t working harder to avoid being called the know-nothing Congress.
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