Walter Russell Mead: Snail Mail Spam Subsidies Stuttering Towards A Stop

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest

The USPS is one of the great surviving examples of the blue social model and, not surprisingly, it is going down the tubes.  Technological change has made its original mission of delivering vital information and private correspondence obsolete.  Judging by what comes in through the mail slot at the stately Mead manor these days, the primary job of the postal service appears to be the delivery of the snail mail equivalent of spam.

Snail spamming is an expensive business to be in; the USPS loses billions of dollars each year so that advertisers can send out billions of pieces of spam at below market costs.  In fairness, e-spammers should demand an equivalent subsidy; shouldn’t non-prescription Viagra dealers and Nigerian con artists get the same kind of help from a benevolent government that the Publisher’s Clearinghouse gets for junk mail?...

What we are mostly hearing these days is that state, local and federal officials have consistently put too little money away for pension obligations: something like $3 trillion seems to have gone astray at the state level.  The USPS looks like a very strange creature indeed: so challenged at business administration that it is too broke to pay its bills, yet so prudent and far sighted that it has stashed tens of billions more dollars than it needs in the kitty for a rainy day.

The USPS has 653,000 workers and wants to cut that to 200,000 by 2015; hundreds of mail sorting facilities will be closed. There is no doubt that USPS workers are looking ahead to tough times. Perhaps the pension savings are coming because with two thirds of its employees on the chopping block, the USPS won’t be paying as many pensions in the future as currently projected....