The ninth plank of my presidential platform is about the USPS, which I already wrote about at some length back on February 9. But I'll repeat the plank here just to keep things in order. If you think you already understand my view, you can skip to the bottom for other diffuse remarks--except for one comment that needs to come now.

Since I wrote what is posted below, and after I wrote my February 9 comment here, the USPS announced that first class rates would rise to 44 cents in May. The reason given: increased costs of operation. No one, as far as I have heard, raised a word in question. 

But folks, this is bizarre. Increased costs?  How?  What?  Everyone with a brain is worried about deflation, the signs of which are everywhere. Even the USPS' fuel costs, despite the spike in prices last summer, look to be lower than usual for the year past and for the year ahead. What increased costs?  If the USPS is suffering increased costs, despite the oversight of the Postal Regulatory Commission established in 1996, then it's because they have to be the worst managers in the country. 

No. 9: Repair the USPS.

The USPS, our postal service, is a disaster. For many years now, the cost of service for ordinary citizens like me has been rising way faster than inflation while the quality of service has diminished. Somehow, the more labor-saving technology the USPS introduces, the more expensive its service becomes. There is no other sector of the American economy where this is true, so why should it be true in the post office?

One reason is that efficient service for the public isn’t anymore the system’s main purpose. Rather, the USPS has become a vehicle for a corporate subsidy. Businesses get highly preferential rates for advertising through the postal system. We are told that the revenue from advertisers makes a profit for the post office, but this is true only in a surrealistically narrow sense. If you add in the transactional costs made necessary by an almost unbelievably complex rate system, and add the fact that most of the advertising is also tax-deductible for corporations, the numbers start to look very different. On the USPS’ two-column accounting system the advertising ink may be black, but the rest of us are knee deep in red fleece.

Our postal regulations are so complex that they make the Social Security and Medicare systems look simple, and that isn’t easy to do. The people who make up the rules, too, seem to be …how to say this nicely?…..complete idiots. It now costs 42 cents to mail a 1st-class envelope, as long as it weighs one ounce or less. For an additional ounce, you need another 17 cents—that being a reduction from before, when each additional ounce cost 24 cents. (Don’t ask why; no one knows.) But when you get to 3.5 ounces—not 3 and not 4, but for some woolly reason 3.5 ounces—the whole rate system changes and now you must refer to the “large envelope table.”

Ah, but this is where the problem begins. There is one rate table for packages heavier than 3.5 ounces that are bendable, or have no "stiffening matter", and a different, higher rate table for those that do have stiffening. Since what is and is not a “stiff” package is not entirely obvious, you can take the same package to two different postal clerks and get two different answers as to what it costs to mail it. The bozos who thought this up, and the lesser clowns who allowed this to go forward, should be taken out and shot—at least with pellet guns. Since Ben Franklin founded the U.S. Postal Service, and since his face appeared on the first U.S. stamp in 1847, no one has ever done anything quite as moronic as this.

Not that the imbecility of the USPS is really as pressing a national problem as the others I have discussed, but sometimes a thing is just so ugly you can’t stand it. And the USPS mess is symptomatic of system wide problems, namely the lack of attention to organizational design as a part of management and the ubiquitous role of Congress (with its unlimited appetite for feeding special interests who in turn feed their campaign coffers) in screwing things up.

In any event, here is what needs to be done. 

First, the President should direct that Congress hire a competent and above all independent auditor to analyze the USPS and recommend management changes. The Postal Workers Union should not be allowed to prevent this overhaul; it is one of the main reasons for the wild inefficiency of the USPS, because it has become almost impossible to fire a derelict employee, no matter what the reason. (I have nothing against trade unions, quite the contrary. But I do have something against public sector featherbedding at citizens’ expense.)

Second, the rate structure needs to be radically simplified. There should be just one rate scale for 1st-class mail, one for advertising, and one for parcel post. That’s it, with equally simply structures for international mail. No zip+4, no bulk rates, no machinable discounts—forget it. We just have to average income and costs over a range of functions as we always used to do, enabling a much simpler, cheaper and faster system with the same overall revenue balance. That would get rid of the thousands upon thousands of USPS middle managers taking up acres and acres of expensive office space whose completely pointless jobs are devoted to servicing the ornate corporate rip-off the USPS has become.

Obviously, this will make advertising by mail more expensive for businesses than it is now, so there will predictably be less of it. Good: Who needs all that crap anyway? Everyone knows that if you tax something you get less of it, and if you subsidize something you get more of it. We should not be subsidizing a function as non-productive as advertising; if anything, we should be subsidizing the exchange of goods via the mail among individuals and businesses, and between individuals and businesses. We can make individual/individual, business/business and individual/business exchanges cheaper, which plainly helps the economy. I can't think of a responsible business that wouldn't trade a significant reduction in its shipping costs for a hike in its advertising budget. In short: Advertising revenue should support basic services; basic services revenue should not support advertising, as it does today.

The postal manual for domestic and international mail, now hundreds of pages long and heavy enough to induce a hernia, must be made to fit into no more than 18 pages. It used to, so there is no good reason why it cannot do so again. This simplification of the rate structure will save huge amounts of money: after all, gratuitous complexity is very expensive.

Third, at the same time, the rate structures need to be modernized. It’s dumb to divide the postal rate structure into discrete ounces below a pound. It used to be that the cost of delivering a package was a function mainly of its weight, but that hasn’t been true for years: The variable that matters most now isn’t weight but how many hands or pieces of machinery have to handle a package from starting point to end point. It does not cost significantly more, or less, to deliver a 4-ounce envelope than it does to deliver a 7-ounce envelope, so there is no justification for charging different rates for them. A dramatically simplified and modernized rate structure will speed up service and further reduce costs. We are fools to have tolerated the bizarre complexification of what is, in essence, a simple and straightforward government function.

Fourth, just for fun, the USPS should introduce a special 2-cent red, white and blue stamp called a “My Two Cents” stamp. This stamp would be used exclusively for citizens to write to their elected federal, state and local officials, at the specially discounted rate of 2 cents per ounce. There’s a subsidy we can really use.