"Going postal" on the USPS

With postal rates scheduled to increase on Monday, this seems an opportune time to post some excerpts from an article excoriating the USPS:

[A]lmost no Americans know what the U.S. Postal Service is, and it’s easy to forgive their ignorance..

So much a part of government was it that its rationale is mentioned in the Constitution, and the Postmaster General was in the line of succession to the Presidency—last in line, yes, but in line all the same. So things remained until President Richard M. Nixon’s Administration reorganized the Post Office Department in 1970... establishing the newly branded USPS as a “corporation-like” independent agency...

The result of all this was a platypus-like creation that is neither exactly a Federal agency nor exactly a private corporation. Nor is it a hybrid government-owned corporation, like Amtrak, for example. The USPS isn’t really a corporation at all...

[T]he USPS continue[s] to subsidize Big Mail by shaping its operations to encourage what it now calls, revealingly, “standard mail”—that is, advertising junk mail...

Most American citizens are blissfully unaware of the degree to which USPS subsidizes U.S. businesses by means of the fees it collects from ordinary postal customers. For example, if you wish to mail someone a large envelope weighing three ounces, you’ll pay $1.17 in postage. A business can bulk-mail a three-ounce catalog of the same size for as little as $0.14...

Because first-class mail volume has been falling off increasingly over the past dozen or so years, thanks largely to the Internet, “standard” mail operations have become proportionately more important to the USPS. So it has gone to some lengths to cater to and to increase this aspect of its business. The lower the postage for bulk advertising mail, the more of it the USPS receives—more than 100 billion pieces per year...

While the standard mail revenue stream has helped keep the USPS apparently solvent, it has amounted to a huge gamble that the increases in volume... would go on essentially forever. This amounted to a Ponzi scheme, and that scheme has now collapsed. Driven by Internet cannibalization and especially the economic downturn, mail volumes have been plummeting off a cliff at a rate several times faster than the USPS’s own experts predicted in their worst-case scenarios. Advertising mail, most critically, is down more than 20 percent compared to last year...

Much more at the link (I don't know the biases of the website and can't vouch for the accuracy of the article, but it is quite interesting). Via Kottke.