Donald Trump hates Jeff Bezos. He’s the founder of Amazon. I hate him too. And if you ask Trump why he hates Bezos, he will give you reasons that are similar to mine. For example, he has noted that Amazon has made a lot of money by screwing state and local governments out of sales tax revenue. He also says stupid things like that Amazon is destroying the United States Postal Service, when it is, in fact he and his fellow Republicans that are destroying it. (That’s the one problem with the post office that I mentioned in the title.) But what Trump says about Jeff Bezos is roughly correct.
If there is one bright spot in having Donald Trump as president, it is that he is completely transparent. Sure, Republicans and other Trump supporters like to pretend that he’s mysterious and he isn’t doing what any reasonably objective person would know he is doing. But that doesn’t change reality. Trump may be the king of liars, but American conservatives are masters at lying — to everyone, including themselves.
Donald Trump Does Care About the Postal Service
So the real reason that Donald Trump hates Jeff Bezos is because he owns The Washington Post, and that paper has been particularly harsh to Donald Trump. (Of course, if Trump really wanted to hurt Jeff Bezos, he would have gotten a tax increase on rich people, but Trump doesn’t hate Bezos enough to harm himself. So instead we got the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which will really only make the rich richer and will likely cause job losses.) So even though what I’m about to write might seem like I agree with Trump (which I have no problem doing when it’s true), I don’t. Donald Trump doesn’t care about the United States Postal Service. If he did, he would do something to help it.
The subject came up because I read an article in Vox (I know! I read it a lot!), Trump Thinks Amazon’s Destroying the Post Office. Here’s What’s Really Happening by Jen Kirby. It bothered me, however, because there is really only one reason that the US Postal Service is losing billions of dollars every year. And Kirby spends surprisingly little time on it.
The Evil Republicans Did in the 2006 Lame Duck
If the Republican Party had no power, it would be hilarious. When the Democrats are in control of the government, but the Republicans get it back in the election, the Republicans scream that no legislation should be passed because “the people have spoken.” We even have a conservative on the Supreme Court because the media was willing to accept this argument for a whole year before a new president took over. Yet when things are reversed, the Republicans go hog wild. I’ve been very concerned that they will manage to repeal Obamacare in the lame duck period, should the Democrats take control of Congress in November.
But in 2006, when the Republicans had been destroyed, they used the lame duck period to pass a law requiring that the US Postal Service pre-fund all their retirement benefits out to 75 years. As the Vox article notes, “A Post Office Inspector General blog entry from 2015 (which, of course, has a big stake in the debate) describes the prefund arrangement like this: it’s as if your credit card company estimated you’ll spend $1 million in your lifetime, so it asked you to send them that $1 million check up front.”
Virtually no real company pays for its retirement in this way, so why make the US Postal Service? That’s simple: Republicans hate the postal service. They would like to cut it up and give it to FedEx and UPS and other shipping companies that pay them money. This was a great way for the Postal Service to look like a drag on the economy that something really had to be done about.
The Postal Service Is in the Constitution!
I know what you are thinking: but the postal service is in the Constitution. And don’t conservatives love the Constitution? Don’t they masturbate to it? Isn’t it a divinely inspired document that could never be improved upon?!
Ah, Grasshopper, you have much to learn. Most conservatives have never read a word of the Constitution. The only thing they know about it is the preamble, and then only in song form:
Try to watch this without the subtext. As the states accumulate, millions of people who used to live there were murdered. every voter is white. I loved this cartoon when I was a kid but it gives me the willies now.
So the Republicans want to destroy the postal service because, given all of its limits, it does a great job. For 49¢, I can send a letter to Hawaii, Alaska, or New York — and to the farthest reaches of those states. Ask the CEO of FedEx if he wants that job. Oh, no! He just wants the lucrative routes. Leave the government to deliver all the money-losing routes.
Congress Hurts the Postal Service in Other Ways
But in addition to this pre-funding of the retirement program, the Congress also stops the postal service from doing a lot of other things. The biggest I see is acting as a limited bank. The US Postal Service could put all of these payday lenders out of business overnight. And at the same time, they wouldn’t be preying on the poor. But we can’t have that. We’ve got to let the free market work when it comes to screwing the poor.
The United States Postal Service is one of the great prides of this nation. It’s unfortunate that for conservatives and the business community, it is just a bunch of money that they can steal. But let’s face it: the way things are going, the postal service probably will be destroyed, existing only as much as the Constitution requires. And given the people on the Supreme Court, that doesn’t mean much: maybe ten people and ten horses. Remember how conservatives see the Constitution they’ve never read: it never changes. So why not horses? It will only take three months to send a letter from California to New York, and only cost a few thousand dollars.
Keep Up the Fight
But we can try. And let’s start with the only problem the US Postal Service really has: the pre-pay requirement. If the Democrats get control of Congress next year, they should pass a law getting rid of that. And who knows? Trump might even sign it! He only cares about “winning!” so why not win this way?