Monthly Archives: May 2017

Op-Eds

The US Postal Service is Dying. Let it.

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Image taken by User:Minesweeper on December 14...
Image taken by User:Minesweeper on December 14, 2003 and released into the public domain. From left to right, the post boxes belong to FedEx Corporation, University of California, Berkeley, United Parcel Service, and two from the United States Postal Service (the one on the left is for Express Mail only) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like most monopolies, the US Postal Service isn’t interested in changing its business model. An enterprise hemorrhaging cash  in a free market would cut prices, improve service, look for new revenue streams, or simply close its doors. The USPS solution, as usual, is to raise prices and hope for the best.

Alternative proposal: Let’s put it out of its misery.

The Service posted losses of $562 million in the first quarter of 2017, the Associated Press reports.  This year will likely bring the Service’s sixth straight annual operating loss. While its package delivery revenues have grown, the areas in which it enjoys a monopoly — “first class” (letter) mail and “marketing” (junk mail) — are in decline thanks to the ascendance of email and other Internet technologies.

That decline is terminal. The age of hand-delivered paper mail on the scale required to sustain the Postal Service model is coming to an end, and the market is already well-situated (via the likes of Federal Express and United Parcel Service) to handle ever diminishing future levels of emergency and vanity traffic of that kind.

In truth, we’ve known for nearly 175 years that the Service’s government-granted monopoly is all that keeps it afloat. Its prices don’t reflect the market value of its services. In 1844, anarchist Lysander Spooner  founded the American Letter Mail Company and turned a profit selling stamps for 6.25 cents each or 20 for a dollar versus the Post Office’s price of 12 cents, delivering mail up and down the eastern seaboard until the federal government shut it down.

In the past, one excuse for a government monopoly on mail was to protect “universal service.” Spooner could make money serving Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, but the government’s postal monopoly used those “easy” routes to subsidize letter delivery to, for example, rural Kentucky and distant San Francisco, where private competitors would have had to charge prohibitively high rates.

Today, however, nearly all US households have telephones (cell or land line). According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of American adults use the Internet, and most of the rest COULD use it. Even with no home connection, they could visit the library or any of numerous free wi-fi locations, just as citizens of rural communities once visited the Post Office to pick up mail in the absence of home delivery.

If the Postal Service shut its doors today, taxpayers would still be on the hook for generous retirement and retiree health care commitments to its current and former employees. That’s no  reason to keep throwing good money after bad forever.

Neither is our natural nostalgia for the big blue corner mailboxes and the friendly neighborhood mail carrier.

Let’s say goodbye to what’s clearly become a relic of a bygone age.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Congress Should Just Say No to Trump’s Afghanistan Surge

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SANGIN, Afghanistan - American and British sol...
SANGIN, Afghanistan – American and British soldiers take a tactical pause during a combat patrol in the Sangin District area of Helmand Province April 10 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With the US occupation of Afghanistan well into its sixteenth year and the country no closer to becoming a stable democracy than it was in late 2001, Antiwar.com reports that this isn’t an “all options are on the table” scenario.

President Donald Trump seems to have rejected the idea of withdrawing US troops and ending the war. Instead, he intends to become the third president in a row to roll the dice on a “surge” — that is, to send in more troops (the initial estimate is anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 more in addition to the current 8,400) and hope for the best.

That idea has never worked before and it’s not going to magically start working now. If Trump can’t bring himself to put an end to America’s Afghanistan misadventure, Congress should force him to do so by either repealing its “Authorization for the Use of Military Force” or using its power of the purse to cut off funding for military operations in Afghanistan.

The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has been nothing but epic fail from the very beginning.

First, it was quite likely unnecessary. After the 9/11 attacks — carried out by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon — president George W. Bush demanded that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers hand over Saudi national Osama bin Laden. The Taliban offered to remand him to a third, neutral country upon the presentation of evidence, even though they were under no obligation to do so in the absence of an extradition treaty. Rather than proffer the requested evidence, Bush chose war.

Secondly, instead of invading, finding, and capturing or killing bin Laden and coming home, the troops were set to play at the game of “nation-building.” While they toppled the Taliban regime and began setting up what they hoped would become a western-style democracy instead of immediately going after bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora, he and his compatriots made their escape over the border into Pakistan. It was nearly another decade before bin Laden was hunted down and assassinated.

Finally, even after it became clear that the forces which denied the Soviets victory in a decade-long war from 1979-89 could and would do the same versus US forces, first Bush and then Barack Obama just kept doubling down, pouring American blood and treasure by the gallon into soil from which peace and democracy refused to sprout. Trump apparently wants to go down in history as Afghanistan failmaster number three.

The US occupation will never achieve its purported goals. If Afghanistan is going to change, it will be the Afghans who change it. They’re not interested in being told how to live by Russians, by Americans, or by anyone else. Can’t say as I blame them.

This column is dedicated to the memory of R. Lee Wrights (1958-2017)

Note: The original version of this column claimed that the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to the US on presentation of evidence implicating him in the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the Taliban’s offer was to hand bin Laden over to a “third party” country. Thanks to Jacob Hornberger for the correction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

The Scandal Isn’t Post-Presidential Speaking Fees, It’s Political Pensions

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English: President Barack Obama speaks to a jo...
English: President Barack Obama speaks to a joint session of Congress regarding his jobs plan, the American Jobs Act (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As former US president Barack Obama’s second term drew toward its close last July, he exercised his veto power for the eleventh of 12 times, shutting down “The Presidential Allowance Modernization Act of 2016.” The bill, which easily passed both houses of Congress, would have reduced former presidents’ pensions and staff allowances dollar for dollar if their other incomes exceeded $400,000 per year.

In the wake of Obama’s decision to accept a $400,00 fee for a Wall Street speaking engagement this September, the bill’s sponsors plan to reintroduce it. But neither the speaking fee nor the veto are what we should be noticing. The real scandal is how lucrative retirement has become for American politicians.

Under the aptly named Former Presidents Act, former presidents receive pensions equal to the salaries of cabinet secretaries. Right now, that’s more than $200,000 per year. They also receive $150,000 per year for staff and office space. That’s not counting the costs of Secret Service protection security for life, managing their monuments (the construction of presidential libraries is privately funded but the government pays their costs of operations to the tune of nearly 20 times those pension costs), etc.

Members of Congress are also eligible for pensions after as little as five years in office. Those pensions aren’t quite so lavish as rumor sometimes has it, but for politicians with long careers they can exceed $100,000 per year. As of 2013, the average congressional pension  was about $60,000 per year.

Why on Earth should politicians receive taxpayer funded pensions at all?

More than half the members of Congress are already millionaires when they are elected to office, and most of them can expect great job offers as lobbyists and so forth after they leave.

Whether a president is wealthy or not prior to his inauguration, he’s certainly going to be after leaving office. That $400,000 speech of Obama’s is chump change compared to the $65 million joint book deal he and former First Lady Michelle Obama signed barely a month after moving out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush apparently only knocked down $10 million each on their books, poor guys).

There’s good reason to treat Congress, the presidency and the vice presidency as, to steal a line from James Madison in The Federalist #62, “an assembly of men called for the most part from pursuits of a private nature, continued in appointment for a short time” — as temporary “public service,” not the kind of lifelong career from which one “retires.”

As of 2015, the median US household income was (according to the US Census Bureau) $55,775. Why are those households paying former members of Congress that much or more, and former presidents nearly four times as much? Their paychecks should end when their terms in office end.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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