This may well be the first time Trump has said or done anything I support.
For far too many years the Post Office has been giving deep discounts to big users. While they’ve officially banned the term “Junk Mail” the junk mailers don’t pay what you and I do to send a letter. Amazon, the malignant tumor which will one day end the human race, can certainly afford to pay what it costs for the Post Office to do its job.
I also want to take significant issue with one part of that article in the provided link. Trump claimed Amazon doesn’t pay sales tax and the article claims that is incorrect, well, just because you put lipstick and a skirt on the family dog doesn’t mean it can be your prom date. Amazon has a loooooooooooooooong history skirting sales tax. You can do a Web search and find articles about how Amazon dropped suppliers from California to avoid sales tax. It happened in location after location when states decided to start cracking down on all of the revenue the Amazon tumor was draining from their coffers.
People who are old enough understand why the Post Office originally started providing discounts to junk mailers as well as large volume catalog mailers. It is required to show up at every dwelling with a legal postal address every day but one. If you are old enough you also remember the television commercials from a while back where the Post Office advertised Christmas Day Delivery. I don’t think they still do that, but, it was pretty unheard of, dare I say, ground breaking, at the time.
You see, if they gave discounts to the mass mailers, there would at least be someone paying to put some fuel in the vehicles because there would be more mass mailings. Then came the mismanagement at Sears which ended the world famous Sears Catalog Division. A great big chunk of revenue went away. Let’s not forget that, for the most part, they also stopped printing phone books. Another massive chunk of revenue went away.
Finally, a big chunk of revenue went away when people learned how to use email and pay their bills on-line. Every month people used to have to send a check to water, sewage, electric, gas, phone, etc. That was every person with a dwelling in their name. Half of you auto-bill and the other half of you schedule the on-line payment for the day it is due. Only a tiny fraction of people still pay by mail.
Yes, the Post Office still has to visit every dwelling 6 days per week. Yes, they still need someone to be paying for the fuel and maintenance of the vehicles as well as the cost of the Postal workers themselves, but, the model currently being used is wrong. It’s time for the junk mailers and the big shippers like Amazon to pay more.
Despite what young-uns and nay sayers wish us to believe, the Post Office must continue and be supported. FedEx doesn’t show up at your house every day to see if you have outbound mail. Mail carriers learn their route and the people on it. They know what is and is out of place. When you fall over clutching your chest in your yard on the way to put a letter in the box, they will most likely be the ones to find you and call for help.
What all of you have forgotten is the Post Office was created to give the average American hope. You may do a job in the ass end of nowhere, but you can send a letter to Washington via the Post Office. If you, the societal drop outs, too busy tapping away on your phone to be part of life don’t understand that hope concept, rent “The Postman” and watch it back to back to back until you do.
After you get done educating yourself about hope, educate yourself on social justice. Rent “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and watch the first hour a lot. Because the Post Office offered Postal Money Orders and Sears took them as payment for your catalog order, you grew up where you grew up and not in a company town as an indentured servant. Yes, the upper one percent seek to either exterminate us or turn us back into indentured servants again this very day, but, because of the Post Office, you are not one now. To quote Tom Hank’s character from “Saving Private Ryan”
Earn this.
It’s time for the Post Office to invert their model. First class mail is going away. Yes, there will still be birthday cards and Christmas letters, but the daily stuff is pretty much gone. The high volume users must shoulder the entire cost of operation leaving first class mail as the discounted postage to encourage more of us to send cards and letters. Dare I say it? Maybe more people will start paying bills by mail…