From NEWSMAX:
…Unfortunately, this new efficiency has been outmatched by a deepening of the Postal Service’s predicament. Over the past five years alone, mail volume has fallen more than 20 percent, and revenue has declined 12 percent. The post office lost $25 billion from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2011. It now has less than $1 billion in cash, a dangerously small amount for a service with weekly operating expenses of almost $1.5 billion. Of the roughly 32,000 local post offices across the country, fewer than 7,000 generate enough revenue to cover their costs.
Which brings us to privatization, a path already being followed for postal services in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. Despite claims to the contrary, privatized entities do not, on average, become miraculously more productive than public agencies. Indeed, privatization can sometimes turn out to be a disaster — as has been the case with the financially troubled U.S. Enrichment Corporation, which produces enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, since it was unwisely pushed out of government by the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department during the 1990s.
In the case of the Postal Service, though, privatization has become the best path forward, mainly because it would take Congress out of the picture. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently argued, “the problem is that neither the management nor the workers really control the Postal Service. Even though the post office has been self-financed since the 1980s, it remains shackled by Congress, which simply can’t bring itself to allow the service to make its own decisions.” And Congress won’t do so, as long as the post office remains part of the government…
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