>>>The Post Office is a monopoly! A government mandated and operated monopoly. They do not compete with FedEx/UPS in standard delivery because they are a federally mandated and maintained monopoly.
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>>Wrong. If the private services were allowed to do regular mail, the USPS would have more problems because the private services would be allowed to skim the easy stuff (like they're doing now) while the USPS would still have the mandate to provide delivery everywhere. (I remember seeing a piece on TV about mail delivery to people living in the Grand Canyon.)
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>>Why do we allow the private sector to get the cream while the public sector has to handle the hard stuff, and then complain because the public sector can't make money doing the hard stuff?
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>>Tamar
>
>The USPS is subsidized by the government at a cost of >96million a year to do just that (as well as service the handicapped).

As it should be. We're asking the USPS to do something that private industry has no interest in doing and that is in the public interest.

My point was that it's unreasonable to compare the business models of the USPS and Fedex/UPS. The latter are based on skimming the cream off of this pool. If we left mail delivery only to private industry, we'd have a large number of people who couldn't get mail at all.

Tamar