politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
It is not. Nor should it be. I'll get back to this is a second.
They are, indeed. The problem is not that Capital One wants to spend money mailing that offer. The problem is that Capital One is getting a deep discount on postage, to encourage them to send that offer physically, by mail, instead of through a more appropriate channel. The postal service needs Capital One to do that, because they need the postage revenue to justify the cost of sending someone to every door, every day.
Going back to your last point about taxpayer funding: should Capital One's choice to send you an offer be subsidized by the taxpayer? Should they pay less for a stamp because the federal government will be picking up the tab?
The postal service either needs to be entirely self funded, or access to that service needs to be restricted to "acceptable" senders, which opens an entirely new can of worms.
As you pointed out, the USPS can't simply reject Capital One's mail; they are legally required to deliver it. Any operational subsidies to the USPS are funding Capital One's marketing budget. With the tax-funded model you are talking about, we are paying for Capital One to send that junk mail. That's simply not feasible.
Not really, no. Yes, they are handling fewer pieces of mail, but their workload isn't really based on that. The principal factor affecting their workload is the number of doors they have to visit. (Even if they dont have a delivery, they might have a pickup, so they still have to visit the door and look for the outgoing mail flag.)
Eliminate all the junk mail, and your mail carrier's bag is a little lighter, but she is still taking the same number of steps on her route; he is still racking up the same number of route-miles on his truck's odometer.
Good points to think about. Thank you.
I did in fact think that USPS was at least partially tax funded, and despite your (rather good, actually) arguments I do still think it is a good idea to help subsidize them with taxes. They are still a necessary office after all, and as you've said, even if people aren't receiving mail they might still be sending it, so the post office has to check. But if most people haven't sent any mail that day that's a huge operating cost that isn't being returned on stamps.
If anything I think I lean toward the idea that civilian mail should be free and business mail should require stamp fees. I admit I'm unsure how to balance the cost of a stamp with tax income to the post office, however. But if businesses want to spam you they damn well better pay for it, and high stamp fees on nonessential commercial mail could be an effective stopper for it. But then we run into problems of how to identify essential vs nonessential commercial mail, or solicited vs nonsolicited if you prefer, and ways to prevent abuse of that system... Companies already write "URGENT!!" all over the outside of their spam envelopes so it's not like that's going to be a useful identifier. I'm unsure how to solve this problem.
There are multiple ways to solve the "USPS has to visit every house every day" problem though, but unfortunately none that I see being realistically implemented. Just off the top of my head here I'm thinking:
A) Mail pickups only happen on one, or several specific, days of the week, thereby allowing them to shave off a lot of route for deliveries on non-pickup days. We could even alternate mail pickup and mail drop off days, 3 of each in a week with no post on Sundays. This is completely viable but everyone will bitch and complain loudly about this and blame me when they're late on payments or the like.
B) Mail pickups only happen at specific drop off locations. Every neighborhood would essentially need a mail drop off box like an apartment complex has. I'm less thrilled about this idea because it might make it easier for people to steal your outgoing mail - though it's not like this is difficult as it is. This combined with option A could lead to massive efficiency gains. Everyone will also bitch and complain loudly about this because they have to walk a block or two to drop off a letter.
C) Start putting solar powered signalers in the mailboxes that tell when they have the flag up. You could piggyback this off of cell phone towers or build your own separate infrastructure to prevent bandwidth issues. That way the post office knows remotely who has a flag up or not and adjust the routes accordingly, even adjusting with live data if you want, we definitely have all the technology to do this. This is by far the most expensive of my half baked options, but it isn't like we couldn't do it if we wanted to, we've had all the tech required to do this for 20 years. Once again, everyone would bitch and complain about this for various reasons, but they'd get over it pretty quick. I view this in the same light as when we cut over from analog TV to digital back in 2009. Everyone gets upset that A Change Is Happening and talks about it for 6 months and then it's just life as normal.
Unfortunately all these things cost some amount of money and are likely to be initially unpopular with voters so I don't really see any of it actually happening. Most people would rather limp along with a half-broken system than replace it with something new. I'm also quite confident that anything I could invent to address these problems will be soundly abused by corps with little trouble.
Seriously though, great points, good discussion, thank you. You've given me a lot to think about.