Government Mandate Puts Profitable Post Office In The Red

Every single day, except for Sundays, we can go out to our mailbox and receive just about any form of correspondence or package that anyone in the world has chosen to send us. All they need is our address. Let’s think about that for a second. Someone on the opposite side of the world can go to their local post office and, with just our address, have that postal agency send a letter or parcel to our country and that object arrives in our mailbox.

This very same system also provides the ability for anyone in America to send us a parcel or letter, directly to our mailbox, from anywhere in the United States for less than the cost of pretty much any private or third party shipper. In fact, when it comes to letters, it costs the same to send a letter across town as it does across the country. How amazing is that?!

This is called the flat rate U.S. Postal Service, and it lost $5,100,000,000 (that’s $5.1 billion) over the course of its last fiscal year. But the postal service’s losses are not the result of the discrepancy in the cost of service whether your letter travels 3,000 miles or 10 feet, nor are the losses the result of the lack of profitability of it’s service offerings. These huge losses are caused by a congressional mandate that forces the U.S. Postal Service to pre-fund 75 years' worth of retirement benefits for its employees.

Come again? Yes, there is only one entity in the entire country that is required by an act of congress to pre-fund 75 years worth of retirement benefits for its employees…our postal service. What effect has this had on the independent, U.S. government agency? Well, before the congressional mandate, it was profitable and in the black every year, but today, it has lost money the last nine years in a row and is $15 billion in debt.

Once again, government has taken a profitable business and regulated it into the red.

Want proof? Take away the retirement pre-funding requirement and the post office would have turned a $623 million profit last year instead of a $5.1 billion loss. While the good news is that this pre-funding requirement actually will end with this fiscal year, our U.S. Postal Service will start 2017 over $15 billion in debt as opposed to beginning the year debt free, as would have been the case for the past nine years without this restricting congressional mandate.

Government’s job should be to regulate trade, not force organizations to take on vast amounts of debt just to exist.

Photo by Xavier Massa via Pexels

Back When You Had To Lick Stamps To Mail Checks

I’m laughing at myself because I just had what I would call a senior moment (can we still say that?) and wanted to share it with all of you. So, you know how you get solicitations for donations to charities in the mail and they’ll include a nickel or a dime or some other object to try to keep you from just throwing it away? Well, I got one of those a couple months back – honestly can’t remember which charity it was from – but that particular charity’s object for that particular campaign was a postage stamp. They say, hey look, we included a postage stamp so that you don’t have to pay the postage to send us money, all the while I am sure thinking that you’re not going to just toss the envelope because you’ll want the stamp, and maybe, just maybe, once you’ve opened the envelope, you’ll actually take a look at their stuff and feel more compelled to make a donation.

Now, needless to say for any of you who know me, I opened that envelope, took out the stamp, shredded the rest of the contents and went about my day because while I do make contributions to charitable causes, it has to be to a place I know inside and out and definitely would never be to one that I have only heard of through a letter they sent to my house.

I know some of you may be thinking hey, wait a minute, is it OK for us to use the stamp, the coins, or the return address labels these charities send to us if we don’t send them any money? Well, you can all make your own decisions about that, but I have it on good authority from the folks at Money magazine that it is perfectly reasonable financial etiquette to use the items that have been sent to you without providing a donation because the items were sent to you unsolicited without any form of obligation from you to said charity. So I say, use those coins, use those stamps and use those return address labels to your heart’s content!

So, anyway, now on to my senior moment:

You youngsters out there may not know about two things. One is that we used to have these things called checks that we used to pay for stuff. It was a piece of paper not much different in size from a dollar bill that was issued by our bank that had our checking account number – see, that is where the name checking account comes from – printed on it and when we wanted to pay for something, say a bill that came in the mail, or for groceries at the grocery store, or to pay a friend you owed some money, we took out a pen and we wrote a date, the name of the person or company we were paying, the dollar amount in both numbers and in words (yes, we had to actually write out One Hundred Forty-Six Dollars and Seventy-Two Cents), a memo about the check if we wished and our signature all on this piece of paper. We then handed it to the person we were paying and they took it to their bank and then their bank sent it to our bank and our bank sent the money to that person’s bank and then that person’s bank gave them the money. This all usually took a couple days, sometimes even longer if there was a weekend in there, especially back in the days when banks weren’t open on Saturday mornings like they are today.

The other thing you all might not know, or remember, is that postage stamps used to not have that convenient sticky backing that they do today. Stamps didn’t used to be stickers, they, in fact, used to be stamps. They had this adhesive film on the back and what we used to do was actually have to lick the back of the stamp in order to activate the adhesive so that our stamp would stick to the envelopes that we were mailing. We did this stamp licking quite often back in the day, especially when all of our bills would come in the mail and we would write out checks to pay for them and have to lick upwards of 20 stamps a month in some cases.

So, don’t worry, I’m getting to that senior moment, I just felt that I needed to explain all of this to you so it would all make sense, especially if checks and licking stamps pre-dates you.

Fast forward to today and I have one bill – only one bill – that still comes in the mail and that I still, for some Godforsaken reason cannot pay online like every other single bill I have. It is the association dues to the city of Aliso Viejo and to top it off, it only comes once a quarter, so I am writing literally only 4 checks a year at this point. I had no idea when I got that book of 50 checks from my online bank for these crazy unforeseen eventualities of having to still write checks that it was going to end up providing me with over 10 years worth of checks!

So, this morning, I tear off the perforated slip at the bottom of the bill, reliving that nostalgia of the days before your ATM card was also a Debit Card, before you received your bills in an email and long before you could just go online and pay for everything and anything under the sun straight from your checking account. I find a pen, write the amount that I am paying on the slip, find that check book, write out the check to the association, stuff it all into the envelope and put the return address label that I sure as heck didn’t send any money to the charity for on the envelope and then grab that free stamp I got two months ago.

It’s a single stamp, one of the Purple Heart ones that says “Forever”, unlike the days of yore when your stamp only had the value that you paid for it at the time, forcing you to drive to the post office when they raised the rates and buy a slew of 1-cent or 2-cent or 3-cent (depending on how bad the post office was doing at the time) stamps to compliment the stamp you had already paid for before they raised the rates.  Remind me to tell you kids sometime about how I used to mail my tax returns to the state and the fed with a check using well over 30 1-cent stamps on the envelope.

This stand-alone Purple Heart Forever stamp is cut perfectly with the serrated edges, just like the stamps I grew up with – the ones that you had to lick – so, guess what I did? That’s right, I licked the back and pressed it against the top right corner of my envelope and guess what didn’t happen? It didn’t stick! So, I licked it again and I pressed it again. And guess what? I didn’t stick!

Had the adhesive somehow become ineffective during the stamp’s travels from the charity to my home in their envelope? Had it somehow dissipated or become inactive while it was sitting in my drawer for two months? This didn’t make a lick of sense! So, naturally, I flip the stamp over to investigate. It is then that I see the little curved swirl that is cut into – you guessed it – the thin paper backing that covers the sticky sticker backing of the sticker stamp. So there’s Old Man Savastano, licking the back of a self-adhesive sticker, trying to mail out his check because the damned city is the only entity left on the planet that will not let me pay their bill online.

In my defense, it looked just like a real stamp.

Image via United States Postal Service