Court rRuling on Obamacare

[trish]

By definition, as long as government runs something — the postal service, the department of motor vehicles, Amtrak, Medicaid, etc. — that something will never, and can never, be "efficient." Health care is no exception.

You've shown Jack Shit. The Postal Service runs fine. It delivers letters in a just a few days time to every back woods place in the country...places you can't get a grayhound to...and for just a few lousy coins. It makes money, except when republicans...not unions...but republicans encumber it with an unreasonable ten year benefit prefunding plan. Amtrak works perfectly fine in the Eastern corridor. Rather than allow the Eastern corridors to financially carry the MidWestern one, the republicans want to privatize Amtrak, scrap service to the MidWest (fuck those hicks rights?) and let their buddies raid the Eastern corridor, steal the rights of way for themselves, the tracks, the trains and the profits. Social Security works perfectly fine. Just lift the cap.

What doesn't work so well is private corporations and banks. They're good at making short term profits for their shareholders, but they really suck at keeping the coastal states of the Gulf clear of oil. Not too good at keeping the ground water clean, or their factories from exploding. They're great at polluting the atmosphere, and also at rendering our antibiotics useless through overuse in hog factories. But hey, don't want no government regulations telling private citizens what they can and can't do, right?

Government is not the solution to every problem and neither is the Free Fucking Market. The founding fathers didn't establish a corporation. They didn't create bylaws for the shareholders to exploit everyone else. They established a Nation of laws of, by and for the people.

[Prospero]

What an amazing contributor to this forum Mr Clifford is with his carefully sculpted version of reality.. Heere is a full blown voice of ideology, shouting to us all through his loudspeaker.

The people elected the the party people who are dedicated to blocking everything and anything proposed by your President or the democrats. Indeed it is well on the record how the new right - the so called voice of ordinary people embodied by the tea party - bullied the old school republicans and unseated many - and now dominate with a creed of opposition to everything and anything that the president presents. There is a gridlock in US governance - and it is the making of the new Right. Of which you clearly are an articulate member.

[hippifried]

Lmg winded repetition of party line dogma doesn't necessarily equate to being "articulate". Evary political forum on the net has at least one poster using the same style, links, & even wording to push the same agenda. This isn't someone expressing themselves. It might as well be an algorithm. Perhaps with a human editor to hide the robotics.

[paulclifford]

>>>The Postal Service runs fine.

You definitely need to seek professional help.

>>>It delivers letters in a just a few days time

Assuming it doesn't lose them first, of course, as it often does.

>>>to every back woods place in the country...places you can't get a grayhound to...and for just a few lousy coins.

Wrong. The cost of mail delivery is in fact higher than a "few lousy coins," but the difference between what it really costs and what you actually pay is borne by the taxpayers, and not by the consumer of mail service who mails a specific letter. Additionally, it was, for a long time, simply illegal to dare to compete with the US Postal Service by delivering letters faster, cheaper, and/or more securely than they — with their fat, lazy, luddite unions — could do it. Eventually, packages and overnight delivery were permitted to the private, innovative sector of the economy, which is how FedEx and UPS became competitors to USPS. However, there are still federal laws preventing private mail carriers from delivering First Class mail on a competitive basis.

Even you could do a more or less decent job of delivering first-class mail if government coercively forbade anyone else from competing with you. In case you weren't aware, that sort of government-protected market for a good or service is known as a monopoly. It's no great achievement to "win a race" if a very strong umpire — government — prevents anyone else from competing against you.

And regarding the USPS's delivering letters to "every back woods place in the country," that's just one of the many reasons why it's going bankrupt and starting to close post offices around the country and reduce service: universal delivery forces high "fixed costs" on the organization — physical post offices, vehicles, fuel, electricity, heat, air-conditioning, mail boxes, staff, maintenance, etc. — even in places whose mail volume is so low, that it simply makes no sense to provide service there. Rural delivery makes no sense financially, but thankfully — because of electronic media such as email, digital bill-paying, etc. — it might simply become irrelevant.

Of course, these same electronic options for consumers are also reducing mail volume considerably in high-volume urban areas. Too bad for the USPS. It will simply have to suffer the same fate as the horse-and-buggy industry when automobiles appeared, and the tallow industry when incandescent lightbulbs were invented and mass produced: the fate is called obsolescence. Bye-bye, USPS! We're tired of waiting in long lines for stamps or envelopes, only to be met with a sign that says "Window Closed." That sort of service (or lack of it) is not what the 21st century is all about.

See this article from the Cato Institute, a free-market think-tank:

http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/usps

Privatizing the U.S. Postal Service

[Ben in LA]

If folks are complaining about the "high price" and quality of the USPS, just wait until it's privatized.

[trish]

Businesses routinely use bulk mailings to distribute flyers and coupons. They get a rate that's dirt cheap, but you don't ever see conservatives complaining about that effective subsidy.

The USPS is the only government agency mandated by the U.S. Constitution, the same sacred document that gave us freedom of speech, freedom from religion and the right for State militias to arm. The Post Office has served us well. It's the only government that collects a revenue directly for the services it provides...a few coins to post a letter. They deliver anywhere and everywhere in the U.S., something private delivery will never do. You probably didn't know that UPS and FED routinely hand off packages to out of the way boroughs and towns to the USPS for final delivery. You can't get bus service to every town in the country, you can't get wifi in every town to send email, but you can get a letter anywhere. If providing that service to every citizen cost a few extra coins, then count us in; by us I mean all the U.S. citizens whose have supported the postal service from this generation down to our forefathers.

Yet conservatives and libertarian subversives in Congress, who just hate it when people get together to improve the quality of their freedoms and their lives, are pushing to privatize the USPS. Of course they can't get the American people to go along with it, so instead they're attempting to dismantle it by restructuring its financial support and obligations.

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/26-1