I must not be a kind liberal who cares; I am not.
An unkind liberal might say, “Go ahead then — privatize the Postal Service. We here in the cities and suburbs will be fine. It’s the rural voters who backed Trump who’ll lose out.” But liberals aren’t saying that, and not just because there are millions of rural voters who didn’t back Trump. It’s because we believe in certain fundamental principles, including the one that says all Americans, wherever they live and whoever they are, deserve to be served by their government.
I don’t care because those rural voters decided by voting for Trump. They deserve to get what they voted for; who am I to deprive them of that?
So why are rural voters hurt the most?
In keeping with that mandate, the USPS maintains over 30,000 post offices, many of which are not economically advantageous. It does so precisely because its mission is not to make money, but to serve all Americans wherever they live, no matter how sparsely populated. According to the Post Office inspector general, 57% of post offices are in rural areas, serving just 16% of Americans. Of those post offices, nearly two-thirds “cost more to run than the revenue they bring in” — compared with just 7% of offices in urban areas. If we shut down every outpost that doesn’t make a profit, thousands of rural post offices would close.
Those are good paying jobs that would be lost, tough shit.
In other words, no one gets a better deal from the Postal Service than rural Americans — most of whom have voted emphatically for Trump in three straight presidential elections. Bringing mail to rural areas is the least cost-effective part of what the USPS does. Commercial carriers such as UPS and FedEx won’t even bother delivering to many rural addresses; it just doesn’t make economic sense to drive miles and miles to deliver a single package. If you use one of those carriers to send something to a rural address, they’ll often just give your package to — you guessed it — the post office.
Many of the fiscal challenges the Postal Service faces are a result of the things it does that a profit-seeking private business would never do. If the post office were privatized, it would probably start charging more — a lot more — for the services it now provides for a pittance. For instance, sending a letter from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles with FedEx will run you about $50 at a minimum; from the post office, it’s just 73 cents. Even with recent increases, we have some of the lowest postal rates in the world (sending a letter in Denmark will set you back 29 kroner, or over $4).
And just like FedEx, a private postal service would probably charge different rates depending on where you send your letter — meaning it would discard one of the foundations of our postal system. It’s fundamental to how we think of mail service that every American can send mail to every other American at the same rate, whether you’re sending a letter to the other side of town or from Apalachicola, Florida, to Alakanuk, Alaska. The Postal Service connects Americans to each other, binding us together as one nation.
The source for all the quotes is here.