Two and a half months after we (and postalmag.com) told you about the PMG’s $857K paycheck for 2008, George W. Bush’s favorite journal, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times “newspaper” has what it calls an “EXCLUSIVE” telling you, umm… basically what we said back in November…
EXCLUSIVE: Postmaster got $800,000 in pay, perks
Moonie Times
The free market has spoken! The Cato Institute book “Free the Mails”, which featured an essay by Bush appointed BOG Chairman James C. Miller III advocating the privatization of the US Postal Service, apparently didn’t exactly fly off the shelves when it was published in 1988. A check of the Cato Institute’s online bookstore shows that there are still copies gathering dust there nineteen years later, even though the price has been slashed to just three bucks! And if you think that’s still too much to pay, you can pick up a copy on Amazon for just sixty three cents. It appears that in the marketplace of ideas, postal privatization has been judged practically worthless…
The “analysis” Bill Burrus refers to in today’s “Burrus Update” is many things, but an analysis is not one of them. The argument made by the IRET is that “delivery point growth is self-financing”. It also makes the perfectly reasonable observation that “Normal businesses regard added customers as a financial opportunity.”
Sounds good- until you consider the fact that we don’t charge by the delivery. The only way added delivery points could be a financial plus is if the added deliveries produce more new mailings, and therefore revenue. IRET backs up its “self-financing” argument with hypothetical examples of how added delivery points should increase USPS revenues. Oddly enough, the paper never gets around to showing exactly how much new revenue has actually been produced by these “self-financing” new delivery points.
Why not?
Maybe because the facts don’t fit the argument?
In FY 2006, the USPS had a 1.28% increase in delivery points over the previous year. So that must have produced a healthy increase in revenue, right? Well, revenue was up 4.0% over the prior year- so maybe Burrus and the neocons are right?! No, sorry- the increased revenue came from the 5.4% rate increase that went into effect in January.
And take a look at revenue per delivery point. Not surprisingly, it was also up last year, but by just 2.7%. Hmmm… A 5.4% price increase in January produces a 4% revenue increase over the whole year, and revenue per delivery is only up 2.7%? So tell me again exactly how new delivery points pay for themselves???
And did I mention that even though revenue was up 4% thanks to the rate increase, expenses were up 4.9%?
But let’s look at the bottom line- how much additional volume did the new delivery points actually produce? Mail volume was up just 0.66%. So volume grew at less than half the rate deliveries did. See if you can find that number in IRET’s “analysis”. And don’t forget that the only volume growth the USPS had was in categories of mail that Bill Burrus detests- presort and advertising.
So why is Bill in bed with the people who are out to destroy the Postal Service? Beats me.
(By the way, if you’d like to play along at home, the numbers cited here are available in the USPS Financial and Operating Statements for FY 2006. If you’d like an unprotected version so you can come up with your own fascinating numbers, click here.)
Hendrik Hertzberg was being facetious sarcastic in the New Yorker piece we linked to yesterday when he suggested that Fox News look into the “War on Washington’s Birthday“, but apparently the Manchester Union-Leader takes the whole thing seriously! The Union-Leader, one of the few news organizations that is actually further to the right than Fox News (and only slightly to the left of say, Benito Mussolini), ties President’s Day in with the “secularization of Christmas” and the general decline of Western Civilization.
The bottom line seems to be that holidays are not supposed to be enjoyable- we’re apparently supposed to spend them in quiet reflection on the contributions of the person being honored, rather than skiing, shopping, or other Un-American Activities.
What can you say to someone like that?
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!!!!!
A gun lobby web site in Ohio is using the tragic death of a letter carrier in Canton, Ohio as fodder for its campaign to further loosen the state’s gun laws. The group apparently feels that the way to make Ohio safer is to have more guns on the street, not fewer. The item includes this gem: “As a postal worker, Milburn likely carried pepper spray to defend herself from potential dog attacks, as United States Postal Service regulations imply that even lawfully carried firearms are prohibited in their building. Milburn was more than likely denied the right to carry a firearm on the job.”
The rabidly right wing, anti-government, anti-postal service group that calls itself “Citizens Against Government Waste” may be a bit slow on the uptake, but they’ve finally gotten around to the scandal surrounding ex-USPS spokesman Azeezaly Jaffer:
“As the USPS’ voluble spokesperson, Mr. Jaffer was notorious for his tartly-worded rebuttals, called “Setting the Record Straight,” aimed at critics who questioned the USPS’s spending and management choices (all of which seem to have been scrubbed from the USPS website). He liked to boldly claim that all the USPS’s costs were “accounted for and fall into two basic categories: the actual costs of moving each piece of mail and the contribution each piece of mail makes to support [the USPS’s] coast-to-coast network. That’s not special postal accounting, that’s the law.”
“Mr. Jaffer’s reckless spending and “lack of candor” should be viewed as part of the operational culture of the USPS. Azzezaly Jaffer was just living large because he had swallowed the prevailing party line. Maybe the USPS does operate like a Fortune 100 business. Just like Enron, Fannie Mae, or Tyco.”
Ouch!
Postcom points out that a group pushing the idea of a Berlin-style wall along the US-Mexico border is asking people to send bricks to their Congressmen.
Could be a revenue windfall! After all, you have to figure that the bricks are never going to get any further than the site where they do the anthrax screening for mail addressed to federal agencies. It’s not like we’d actually have to deliver them to the actual members of Congress.
Best quote from the web site:
“It is very important that you include a message on the brick and a signed letter so that the brick is not just discarded.”
(Clever- I know when I get a brick in the mail I always look to see if there’s a signed letter with it before I decide what to do with it.)
