For months now, residents of small communities have been lobbying to keep their post offices. The U.S. Postal Service argues, logically, that it doesnt make fiscal sense to maintain post offices serving just a handful of residents in towns only a few miles apart. After all, few people walk to the post office; most drive to work in larger communities nearby, where they could collect their mail five days a week.
But mail has been woven through the life and lore of the West since the fleeting glory days of the Pony Express. Even in towns with no residential delivery, a post office like a school or a church is part of the essential infrastructure that knits people together in a common life. While the loss of a local post office might not change individuals lives all that much, it definitely would influence the life they share. The citizens of rural communities wont give up easily.
This weekend, though, the New York Times reported that the postal service will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month to fund health care for future retirees, and that unless Congress allocates funds soon, the system may not be able to continue operating.
(S)ometime early next year, the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks, officials warn, forcing it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly.
The postal service is a fee-for-service agency, not intended to be subsidized by taxpayers, but the Internet and other carriers have siphoned off the more lucrative portions of its business, leaving it, unfortunately, with the components few competitors want, especially in rural markets. In places where residents and businesses are few and far between, delivery is prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, the costs of providing the benefits promised the agencys retirees who made career and life choices based on those commitments has grown prohibitive. One reason companies like UPS and FedEx have competed so successfully is that they dont have those bills to pay.
Closing a few post offices, or even a few thousand, wont solve this problem, and at a time when the government is so unpopular, its hard to find good arguments for pouring taxpayer money into a service whose business model is so clearly unsupportable.
Yet its hard to see how Congress can refuse to act. The ramifications of a postal service collapse rank alongside the potential implosion of the automotive industry. Quickly cobbling together a network of private businesses to replace it seems almost impossible, and letting the free market work means that some people simply will not be served. Those people are likely to be the same ones with very limited access to other communications services. The nearest freight office might be several towns away. If they have Internet at all, it may be dial-up, and if they dont, signing up for that service isnt a cost-effective way to pay a few bills each month.
Unfortunately, the U.S. mail isnt a cost-effective way to do that either. Even if Congress chooses to infuse billions of dollars and overturn job protections to allow the layoff of 120,000 postal workers, the USPS must be drastically restructured very soon to avoid withering away. That withering might be the best outcome, but it will be extremely messy.
Congress, prompted by constituents, must decide how much of that mess the country can tolerate and how much intervention should be devoted to avoiding it. Is that the governments job? Perhaps not, but this may be one instance in which fiercely independent rural people argue for broad government responsibility.
