USPS worth higher rate
In yet another attack on the wallets of the American consumer, the U.S. Postal Service has announced that this summer it will raise the rate to mail a first-class letter from 63 cents to 66 cents. Outrageous!
But before you start painting your protest placard, you should know that the United States enjoys some of the lowest postal rates in the developed world. So if the Postal Service wants a few more cents, we ought to cough them up.
Let’s see how we stack up against our peer countries. Deutsche Post, the German postal company, puts out a periodic report on prices across Europe; I’ve used the data from its 2022 report, converted the currency from euros to dollars and added in the United States.
Nearly every European country charges more to mail a letter than the U.S. Postal Service does. In some cases, it’s many times more.
Think about that for a moment. There are a few things you can buy for 66 cents — a banana or two or half a candy bar. But for that small fee, the postal service will come to your house or business, retrieve a letter from your mailbox, take it anywhere in the country and deliver it to the recipient within days.
This service will involve various modes of transportation, complex machinery and the labor of multiple workers. That it can be offered for a bit more than half a buck is a remarkable tribute to the power of human ingenuity.
And the distances that have to be traversed are enormous. The rate is the same no matter where your letter is going - which, by the way, is a gigantic gift to the residents of far-flung rural areas, most of whom vote for the party that hates government. You can send a letter from the southernmost point in the continental United States (Key West, Fla.) to the country’s northernmost incorporated place (Utqiagvik, Alaska), which is 4,283 miles as the crow flies, for that same 63 cents. And that’s not even mentioning Hawaii.
U.S. postal rates have always been low, and they haven’t gotten much higher. Fifty years ago, mailing a letter cost 8 cents. Adjusted for inflation, that’s 55 cents today, or just a bit below the current cost of a stamp.
Some places in the industrialized world have slightly cheaper postal rates, but they tend to be small countries that face nothing close to the logistical challenges our postal service does. In Singapore, for instance, you can send a letter for the equivalent of about 23 cents. But the entire nation is smaller geographically than New York City, so it doesn’t have to go very far.
The U.S. Postal Service has a unique funding structure. Unlike nearly every other federal agency, it’s supposed to pay for itself (nobody asks why the Agriculture Department isn’t turning a profit). Outside of the occasional limited appropriation from Congress for a particular purpose such as electrifying the truck fleet, it receives no taxpayer funds. When the agency has a shortfall, it borrows money from the Treasury Department to make up for it.
A bill President Biden signed last year greatly improved the post office’s finances by wiping away $57 billion in liabilities and removing an onerous requirement that it pre-pay decades’ worth of retiree benefits. But balancing the books also requires increasing rates.
Most Americans are fine with that because the Postal Service binds us together as a nation. When you pay an extra 3 cents, you’re helping to subsidize delivery to far-flung rural areas, which might be unprofitable but is vital for a society in which we believe everyone, no matter what corner of the country they live in, should share the same services.
The public understands how valuable the Postal Service is. It has long been one of the most popular agencies in the federal government, and despite the jokes some people make about lines at the post office, the truth is that it performs an almost unimaginably large task with remarkable efficiency.
And all it costs you is a few coins. So if the price of a letter goes from 63 cents to 66 cents? We can probably manage it.