EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL RESCUING THE POSTAL SYSTEM Like little Topsy, the problems of the United States Postal Service- and, therefore of the American people-keep growing. Legislation to provide financial...
...until recently, that is...
...These are ideals that viewed mail service as a crucial link in the circulation of ideas, news, information, knowledge-the very things on which people and institutions depend for successful self-government and for harmonious and fruitful interrelationships...
...Cutbacks in service, including elimination of so-called marginal post offices, continue on a seemingly arbitrary basis...
...There is even talk of reducing home deliveries to four or three days a week...
...This is essential if the country is ever to get back to the ideals of service on which the postal service has been predicated for most of its existence...
...How much longer this will be the case is open to question...
...Actually, not too much more would have to go wrong for the system to devolve into chaos, much as the Italian postal system did a few years ago...
...Business mail deliveries have been reduced in major metropolitan communities from three to two a day, and in some cities are already down to one a day...
...But they do say that the Postal Service should be self-sustaining, and since the reorganization of the postal system in 1970 that self-sustaining philosophy has been the source of considerable of the agency's woes...
...Postal Service in the delivery of letters...
...Admittedly, this could create problems of another sort, including that of increased political interference in postal affairs...
...His is probably a characteristically American idea, in that it would let the forces of free competition take over and provide the country with the kind of mail service it "needs and deserves...
...3144) that would allow private carriers to compete with the U.S...
...Senator James Buckley would relieve some postal problems by repealing the Private Express Statutes that permit a government monopoly in the delivery of first-class mail...
...The Constitution, as Senator Goldwater lately reminded, says that "Congress shall have the power 'to establish Post Offices...
...Legislation to provide financial relief to the Postal Service gets stalled in the Senate Post Office and Civil Service Committee...
...this could happen as private companies cut into the profitable urban routes, draining off revenues needed for the servicing of rural and remote districts, which are a heavy expense and which private companies, in turn, would not be interested in handling...
...A necessary concomitant to such a change in outlook and priorities would be the return of the Postal Service to direct Congressional control...
...It is easy to imagine a scenario in which private companies got into the mail business just long and deeply enough for the coup de grace to be administered to the government's system...
...But at least it would get the Postal Service out of the grips of the business- and profit-oriented types...
...Indeed, many of the Postal Service's problems would disappear in the morning, if just one or two of the $100 billions being pumped into the military this year were diverted to help solve its problems...
...The new masters of the Service probably don't say so either...
...Worker and public morale slips along with service, and deficits skyrocket: up from $13 million in 1973, to $825 million in 1975, to a projected $2.4 billion this year...
...But whether this is the answer to the mail bind is/ dubious...
...Meanwhile, rates climb higher (that 13-cent stamp cost you a nickel in 1963), and there are ominous rumblings of a union-leadership struggle within the Postal Service...
...He has introduced a bill (S...
...A far better solution-one Commonweal has advocated before, while confessing its own self-interest in economical second-class mailing rates-would be for Washington to return to the vision that inspired the founding of the Post Office in 1789: namely, that of essential public service, and accordingly as deserving of generous public subsidy as, say, the military (which is seldom denied anything, no matter what the expense...
...Whatever its problems and whatever its financial losses, however, the Post Office could be relied on in the past to get the job done with reasonable dispatch...
...But then it was never realistically expected to...
...It does not say that the mail service shall make a profit...
...At stake is nothing less than that...
...If the New York Times is to be credited, the latter could lead a few months hence to a situation even more turbulent than that of 1970, when the New York local of the National Association of Letter Carriers gave the nation its first big postal strike...
...The Postal Service-nee, Post Office Department-has never been an agency without problems, and in its long and generally honorable history has probably never paid its way...
...In other words, end its semi-independent status...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 13
