Do we still need the Post Office?
Do you like trees? I do. Who doesn’t? So why does our government encourage private companies to chop down millions of them each year and grind them into paper? And why does the government drive 18-wheel, pollution-belching trucks millions of miles all over America carrying this paper? Here is the answer: So that businesses can send mail to people who usually throw it away unread. Does this make sense in the Internet Age? Not really.
These costly, out-dated, environmentally harmful practices will not stop until the government says goodbye to the U.S. Postal Service as we now know it.
More than 90 percent of all mail is junk mail — catalogues and flyers sent by people trying to sell stuff to people. Most of us communicate with one another by calling, e-mailing or texting. We don’t write letters. Many businesses also are moving away from paper mail. This is why mail volume has dropped 25 percent since 2008. And does anyone even like going to a post office and standing in line? Nobody I know.
The Postal Service has run more than $25 billion in deficits in the past five years. It’s time for a change.
Fifteen years ago, the head of the Postal Service shocked many people by saying it should be privatized. That’s a great idea. Other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden, have successfully privatized their postal services. If we privatized the U.S. Postal Service, its new owners could figure out how to reinvent it for the 21st century. We might start to see investment in new technologies, like using drones to make deliveries.
When Ben Franklin ran the post office in the 18th century, mail was often delivered to inns and general stores. Wouldn’t it be great if in the 21st century you could go to a coffee shop to drop off a package? That’s exactly the kind of innovation we could expect, if we privatized the Postal Service.
