Is It Time To Get Rid of the USPS? (employment, drugs, FBI)
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No insurance company can handle the level of insurance that FDIC handles. Your suggestion here makes no sense.
The Internet was actually developed by the private sector (BBN Technologies and assistance from universities) as ARPANET. It was simply funded by the government. The Web was developed by CERN in Switzerland.
Healthcare has gone up due to overregulation and horrible patent laws. The ignorance here is offensive. The fact that pharmaceutical and medical device patents only last 20 years forces pharma and mdd companies to to charge extremely high prices just to break even with the amount of research $$ they put into it. If they made the patents last a reasonable amount of time and added profit caps, healthcare would be much cheaper. But the government doesn't care about cheap and affordable healthcare.
I agree that the government should do what others cannot. This is not the case with USPS. There's several companies already successful at delivering letters and packages. The government needs to focus on policies that improve the economy and society. Not on delivering letters.
"No insurance company can handle the level of insurance that FDIC handles"
Ah, privatize the profits, socialize the losses - the mantra of the too-big-to-fail capitalist.
"Simply funded by the government"
I won't list out the other innovations bring brought to use by DARPA, but suffice it to say they are impressive. This is a very poor argument on any point - based on your "simply" we could say all the highly paid CEOs "simply vote at a board meeting" since they are rarely in the lab coming up with the next big thing. It's a big and complex world out there and governments and corporations do the organizing.
Aircraft and Space Development, the Telegraph, the TC Railroad and many other great acheivements were "simply funded" by the government.
Healthcare? C'mon. Every expert - let alone anyone with common sense -can understand that more money can be made and extracted from sick people than from healthy people. That's not physics or rocket science, eh? Since we compartmentalize everything (that is, the surgeon is not celebrating that vast amounts of people are obese because the corporations made the government approve faulty diet recommendations, etc. etc.) - we have the perfect storm. Capitalist (predatory) health care will never work...never has, and never will. Plenty of regulations in every other civilized country in the world....where health care is a right!
Heck, even Russia and Cuba cover all their citizens...let alone all of the rest of the 1st world. We don't - and our costs are 40-70% higher. That money goes to people whose names you may know - like Bill Frist (head of the Senate under GW - family owned Multi-Billion dollar hospital chains), Mitt Romney and MANY others.
You can talk until you are blue in the face but even the lemonade stand knows you can't add millions of shareholders to the enterprise without needing to satisfy them.
We are also the only (or one of two) country in the world to allow (again, Predatory) direct to consumer advertising of Pharma. That's sick. Really sick. Preying on people's natural fears and using such marketing to lure people to spend their money....often times for products which endanger their lives.
At a certain point, it's communism (socialism). I.e. everyone equally has nothing except the golden few. Part of society is understanding the needs of one don't outweigh the needs of many. In the end, everyone can't get what they want unless they're willing to do it on their own (or pay for it).
Are you saying words matter? Who cares what you call it?
Isn't it interesting that people have no problem living in the "Commonwealth of Pennsylvania" but they then worry about socialism?
We should drop that word from the vocabulary. It's really quite simple Every advanced country on the planet (and even most non-advanced ones) requires from 25 to 50% of the incomes to run the ship. This being the case, it is "socialism" at 31%? At 32%
In school we learned that socialism is when the government owns most of the major industries - like steel works, car manufacturing, etc.
Anyway, the basics are this. The Government pays 65% of all health care costs in this country. It did so under Reagan, under Bush and under Obama. Yet it was never called "socialism" until recently. Why?
In terms of "everyone has nothing" - I would say that is the case when we don't have universal health care and a clean environment. Those two things are certainly more important than the next cool gadget from Communist China. And yet we don't have them. Why? Can't we afford them? Are we that much poorer than the rest of the world?
I fear we have become such a "consumer society" that we have forgotten what a real society is or should be. It becomes more like a Reality Show- maybe "The Apprentice" or something...
As someone who sells online (mostly eBay), postage costs make me fret. I have no retirement plan and I gotta pay for everyone else's retirement plan every time i ship something?
Sorry, but it's your choice to be an online seller and your choice to use the USPS.
I care more that there are good jobs with benefits available to people who are willing to get up, get dressed and go to work 40+ hours per week.
Have you considered other work which would get you that retirement plan, healthcare, etc?
A lot of older people still pay their bills by check, and get their bills in the mail. When I ship a package I only ship with USPS. Maybe in the future we can get rid of it but not now, and what will the millions who lose their jobs if USPS shuts down do?
UPS, FedEx, DHS, Lone Star Overnight, etc. would be expanding to take up the slack, so the logical thing would be to apply for those jobs.
PS: You do realize that with the USPS no longer in operation, the above-named entities would handle first-class mail, don't you?
UPS, FedEx, DHS, Lone Star Overnight, etc. would be expanding to take up the slack, so the logical thing would be to apply for those jobs.
PS: You do realize that with the USPS no longer in operation, the above-named entities would handle first-class mail, don't you?
Do you realize what they would charge? And there's a good chance they would simply refuse to deliver to remote rural areas, they can't make money off of it unless they charge $15 a letter. I'm not sure why people think that privatization is the answer to everything.
That's what the USPS does. It serves the public. That's why it delivers first class letters for less than fifty cents. Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS focus simply on the cash-cows. Letters? Pfft. Who cares? No profit in that!
Actually, the reason FedEx and UPS don't carry letters is because federal law prohibits them from doing so.
Quote:
To enable the Post Office Department to serve all Americans, no matter how remote, yet still finance its operations largely from its revenue, Congress gave the Department a monopoly over the carriage of letter-mail by a group of federal laws known as the Private Express Statutes.
Do you realize what they would charge? And there's a good chance they would simply refuse to deliver to remote rural areas, they can't make money off of it unless they charge $15 a letter. I'm not sure why people think that privatization is the answer to everything.
I reckon they'd introduce a volume-based pricing system, but I have no way of anticipating what the rates would be. Hopefully, the (assumed) rate increase would reduce or eliminate all the junk mail that is produced and delivered. Think of the environmental benefits!
I reckon they'd introduce a volume-based pricing system, but I have no way of anticipating what the rates would be. Hopefully, the (assumed) rate increase would reduce or eliminate all the junk mail that is produced and delivered. Think of the environmental benefits!
Well if you are an advocate of ensuring that businesses prosper I can't imagine why you would want to eliminate 'junk mail' that is how tens of thousands of businesses advertise.
And it loses that much money because the Republican congress has been so intent on proving it a failure that they have refused to consider allowing them to add additional services like offering money transfer and prepaid debit cards - ideas that have created solvency in the post offices in other nations.
Republicans do deserve criticism for not innovating the USPS (or, rather, not allowing the USPS to innovate itself) and I called for such innovation in earlier posts in this thread. However, the Democrats have been no better, so you can go ahead and include them too in your criticism. The USPS posted $2.8 and $3.8B losses in 2008 & 2009 (yes, when the Dems had control of Congress). In any case, please go ahead and publish the list of Democrats out there telling the American Postal Workers Union they need to give on their extraordinary benefits. I'm sure the Democratic Party can't wait to say no to unions...
The USPS absolutely needs ability to better control costs and be able to sell additional products; they have all but pleaded on hands and knees to be able to do these things to keep them solvent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WildCardSteve1
If they went out, it would not take long for private companies to jack their prices to the sky.
In a true free market, competition would provide a check on pricing. Where we don't see competitive pricing, it is due to the market being manipulated to restrict competition. The Government is very good at enacting that kind of restriction either through regulations that keep competitors out of a market (usually preferred by big companies that buy off politicians of both parties), or by giving corporate welfare to companies in favor by the government.
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