Binding the Nation Together – as long as it’s profitable….
ByThe title of the piece that caught my eye last week is “Rural Post Office closures will hurt Natives, elderly and the poor.” by Winona LaDuke in The Circle – Native American News and Arts. This is a Minneapolis-based newspaper serving the Native American population.
The author points out that a number of post offices in remote areas of Minnesota are scheduled for closure. The author gets the reason wrong – citing “federal budget cuts”, but she puts forth reasons for keeping these rural post offices open that go deep into a subject that seems absent from the discussion in Washington: “One might ask…if the USPS is a business or a service in this country, and question the long term costs of the closure.”
Is the USPS still tasked with “binding the nation together”? Certainly from Ms.LaDuke’s experience and reporting, in the Native American community there is a very pressing need for it to do just that. Unfortunately, the costs of discontinuing critical postal delivery services will be severe, and only partially “measurable”. And if it can’t be measured, Congress doesn’t want to hear about it.
Some of the consequences:
- a loss of 4,000 jobs, not a small matter in a community with few businesses or opportunities.
- the Internet is not a common tool among Native Americans, at only about 10% penetration (rural population, scattered, and poor – not a business opportunity); they need the mail.
- a higher proportion of people without drivers’ licenses or vehicles – they can’t drive 10 miles to another town for their mail.
- a highly mobile employed population which migrates between cities and the reservation, and need a permanent postal address for both legal and employment purposes.
- Address system maintenance for voting privileges, communication with government agencies, including social services and the justice system.
Let’s be clear. We are talking about a very poor community that needs the USPS as no other community does: “ Let’s start with the paperwork of being poor. Simply stated, it is a lot of work or “white paper” to be poor in this country. Just attempting to get a job, and making sure one is able to respond to prospective employers, requires a valid postal address. Voting requires a valid postal address, and people need to correspond with agencies, whether social services, justice department or energy assistance. Losing those post offices will be a burden to people who have no other way then the postal service to conduct their business. People cannot drive elsewhere for mail, and more mail will not be delivered.”
It should be easy for Congress to declare that the taxpayers should support the USPS in situations such as these. The social good to be derived is all too clear. And if it amounts to even $1 billion a year I would be astounded. After all, as Ms. LaDuke points out: “If the Bank of Scotland could get $84 billion in a federal bail out in 2008 (Bank of America got a slim $91.4 billion) it would seem that the USPS might deserve more of a break. The rural post office closures will save $ l billion…Layoffs in the largely rural post office closures will result in around 4000 jobs lost.”
In Washington, this social cost is being ignored.
Lets do some real investigating before writing a story please. The US postal service receives no taxpayer money and has not since 1970. Furthermore this so called crisis is a manufactured one by congress because of a 2006 law. It required the postal service to pre-fund 75 yrs of retirement benefits and do it in 10 years. No other business in America public or private has this mandate. We are not asking for a bailout. We are asking to pay as we go like everyone else. Also we had two independent agencies come out and say we overfunded these benefits by billions of dollars. We are a cash cow for the gov. That money is not just sitting in a fund some where waiting to be drawn. Its being drawn by the gov. to cut down on the deficit. Postal management is taking advantage of this so called crisis to close post offices and processing plants. The closing of these smaller rural post offices makes no sense because they cost the usps so little to operate. You got one thing right that it will hurt these communities when it is totally unnecessary. Lets get the real story out there about this please.
This comment makes a perfectly valid point about the original article, which suggested that the USPS benefits from taxpayer support. It does not,as the commenter points out. However, the commenter suggests that postal managements is using the fact it can not get back the excess funds it has paid into the pension and medical accounts as an excuse to cut back on its services. We disagree with this analysis. The USPS is nearly bankrupt, and from my experience the last thing the USPS senior management wants is to run a smaller system. But it has no choice because Congress has decided the USPS must be self-supporting. We need to acknowledge as a society that there is a need for the “social good” role of the USPS, which isn’t a profitable one.
Editor.
The following is submitted by our member Alex Pigot of GoCode in Ireland:
Dear Charles,
Great article.
‘Social cohesion’ is the term I use when talking about post offices especially in rural communities.
In Ireland post offices are one of the few places that the elderly and disadvantaged in our society can come to meet at a low cost – on days when they are picking up their welfare cheques etc. It’s a warm place to stand while queuing and they can chat and catch up on local gossip not only with each other but with others in the queue which can particularly include younger mothers collecting their own children’s allowances (a social welfare payment made to all mother in Ireland with children under 18 years of age).
This interaction provided by the local post office reinforces the social cohesion within the community between these people and rest of the community.
In my opinion, in every country, the cost of providing local post offices should be hived off from the cost of running a universal service and that cost be provided to the USP by central government.
Good work, Charles, you have my admiration.
Keep the faith my friend, as we say in Ireland.
Cheers.
Alex.
We could be profitable if not for the government. If not for the 5.5 billion we have to pay each year because of the mandate we would have made a profit since 2006.