President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Don't try back of the matchbook math. It's not that simple. Revenues have been declining, because their volumes have been falling sharply. Something like 3 or 4 percent last year on mail. That 10 percent number you magically came up with is probably another 3 percent behind how much you'd need to raise prices by the time you actually raised prices, if your reasoning were true, and it's not, because. .... ... that nickle a stamp thing is silly. They are not doing $69 billion in revenue selling stamps. Mail volumes have been falling off a cliff. Package delivery is where they are actually competitive (and volumes have been increasing).

If you raise those package prices by 10 percent, they aren't going to be competitive anymore. So what you just suggested would be the ACTUAL death of the USPS (assuming the madness would end once the politicians saw losses in the tens of billions per year).

An actual business that has to be competitive and find an equilibrium price in a world of supply and demand (not one being run philosophically on message boards) doesn't decide how much it wants to charge and just set a price. If that was the case, newspapers would print money. It either provides a service that it can profit at, at the prices consumers will pay. Or it doesn't. Package delivery is clearly something that is viable. ... for a WELL RUN business. That is an impossibility for the USPS, because of its nature. It locks itself into costs that guarantee losses, and your solution is, "Raise prices!"

Which is the other point of your, "Simple, raise prices 10 percent." You posted the fiscal 2017 loss. But this train wreck didn't start in the last year. The USPS has something like $125 billion of unfunded pension liabilities. Those haven't gone anywhere. So, go back to the matchbook. ... should they just raise prices by 125 percent to fix their problem? Because apparently in message board world demand isn't elastic, and people will just pay whatever the USPS charges (because UPS and FedEx don't exist, and nobody else will step in to compete).

I don't WANT to cut salaries. You are attributing motives to me. This isn't about MY wishes. It's about reality. I would be thrilled with every postal carrier earning a million dollars a year because their productivity is worth that million dollars to a thriving operation.

 

What you said has zero to do with the USPS today obviously, and the $125 billion or so of senseless debt obligations it has racked up in recent times. ... I mean, the Guttenberg printing press was instrumental to human development. And today we are living in an increasingly digital world, of course. I'd no sooner subsidize printing presses at collective expense, either.

Also, I really don't want to get bogged down in an argument about this. But just how instrumental was the USPS in building roads and railroads and air routes? People who make those kinds of arguments never look at the opportunity cost (which is difficult to know for certain) of the path we took relative to the alternative. I mean, what if demand for letters and packages being sent from one place to another would have dictated that those roads and railroads and air routes would have been built (because of that demand) anyhow (and I'd argue that is a near certainty). ... and really the USPS made it so that it was done in a much less efficient and more costly way that actually hindered overall development?