This morning’s Washington Post has a great OP-ED piece on how it’s time to Privatize the USPS.
The article also addresses how the internet has virtually all but nailed the coffin shut on this age old institution. Is it time for the USPS to be done away with and sent spinning off to a private company? It’s bleeding of ton’s of tax payer dollars yearly, has got to stop as we enter a new era of cost cutting.
Who would have believed when the internet was invented that it would very closely bring around the demise of this institution. Email now makes up most of our communication these days, with texting and instant messages a clear 2nd and 3rd.
The age of video conferencing has been promised to invade even further in this as well. George Will’s article talks about a 3 day delivery service as the next step to make the postal service profitable. I clearly think it’s TIME to privatize this agency and only allow for delivery to residences that HAVE SOMETHING mailed to them. Clearly this will not go over well for rural areas that would see a daily delivery drop to that of weekly. However if commercial carriers are in place in those areas service would continue.
Possibly this is the reason the Federal Government is pushing that all of the US be connected to the Internet with it’s latest round of pushes for rural area’s to be covered and getting computers out to households that do not have one. This would completely eliminate the need for the USPS if we all received our mail on the internet. Clearly it is time to start considering if this service is something that will even exist in the next 10 to 20 years or if there will be a need for it.
Update 12.06.2011 7:16am – Latest round of cuts for the USPS are out. Bloomberg Businessweek outlines the plans to keep USPS going and slash debit, in it’s article “Cuts to first-class mail to slow delivery in 2012“.