Elimination of First Class? The End of the Postal Service

If the Postal Service eliminates First Class Mail, then that will eliminate the entire reason for the Postal Service existing. Without First Class Mail, everything else the Postal Service does can be done more efficiently by competitors.

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That would be the end of the U.S. Postal Service. The wheeze is made that "everything can be done online." Nothing could be further from the truth. First, half of households are estimated to not have computers. What about them? How do they send mail, bills and such? It's going to impact the poor heavily. Second, ~80% of those households that are connected to the net are on dialup, unlike any other nation on the planet. When other nations during the 2000s busily built broadband networks, our U.S. companies didn't invest in new technologies nearly as rapidly.

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Third, of those that have broadband, most have a 5GB cap, thanks to the U.S. internet service providers collusion as an industry. Who wants to use their entire monthly alotment sending a few pieces of mail? Images are large items that take a LOT of bandwidth. Fourth, the Internet is inherently an unsecure place. The millions of security breaches and millions of user profiles stolen from sites just this year make mail more attractive for financial instruments— for crooks. China, Russia and North Korea would certainly like our sensitive documents to all become computerized. Fifth, our legal framework has not caught up to banking and bill paying online. There is little accountability built into automatic payments/ withdrawals— if a company withdraws money earlier than the date they stated, or they withdraw the wrong amount, you now have the interesting time trying to set it right and you may well have a problem with an overdraft, as well. You are at the mercy of the company you gave your bank numbers to. Debit transactions are somewhat safer, but there are still any number of dishonest "holds" that can and are placed on checking account funds that are designed to cause overdrafts, allowing extra fees to be charged. The internet and legal infrastructures to "go electronic" are simply not in place. Yes, the tripling of oil costs are killing the Postal Service. Raise the price of stamps to cover that cost. Don't ruin the best mail system in the world merely for the sake of political correctness and the "if we just say it, it will happen" of the Democrats. It can't happen. Like everything "green" and everything "sustainable," this plan of the USPS will end up being disasters that create far more problems than they solve. The "Obama Touch" strikes again. Everything this Administration touches turns to arsenic. Mr. Hunt has worked both in the engineering and biology fields with things so different as fisheries in the mid Klamath basin and the Corps of Engineers. usexidraconis@hotmail.com

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