This evening when I checked my mailbox, I got a credit card advertisement from my bank and a pile of political ads. As usual, I stuffed the political ads and excess garbage in the white envelope marked "postage paid by addressee" that came with the credit card ad, and I dropped it back in the mailbox. I do that to help teach them not to send me anymore frivolous mail.
But then I was reminded of a concern I have whenever I get junk mail nowadays. I have to pay for it. It is not just the 37 cents that mailers pay for each piece of garbage that I receive. It is also 1 billion dollars in yearly taxpayer subsidies, including a chunk of my paycheck. If the taxpayers didn't have to shoulder the cost of postage, I am almost entirely certain that we wouldn't get a lot of junk mail, and even if we did, we wouldn't have to pay for it. If we had to pay, say, two dollars instead of 37 cents for each postage, then it is much more likely that Wells Fargo and congressman Brian Baird would use their own money to advertise instead of mine.
I was curious about exactly how much of my junk mail is paid for by the junk mailers and how much of it is paid for by the rest of us, so I went to usps.com. That didn't help. So I did a Google search, and I found an
article published by the Citizens Against Government Waste from the year 2000. I found out that there is no way to fulfill my curiosity, because the USPS does not keep track of its finances well enough to answer the question.
But there is much more than that. The article from CWAG is very scary. We pay much more for postage than we think. Although the USPS claims to be self-sufficient, the USPS is exempt from the costly taxes, regulations and fees imposed on businesses that normally help compensate for the public costs of maintaining such businesses. Furthermore, the USPS has a government-enforced monopoly on parcel delivery, strangling the possibility of innovations that could make postage a lot more efficient and cheaper for everyone. The USPS even has the lawful power to decide how much their competition charges, and it uses this power to maintain the monopoly. And furthermore, there is wasteful spending around every corner of the USPS, from daily limousine rides for the executives to sponsoring sports teams (why do they need to advertise?). Those are the things we are paying for.
The best solution that comes to mind is that the USPS should be completely privatized. I no longer feel like paying for such public services that are overused and abused. How can anyone disagree with this?