Since people complain that the Postal Service is not profitable, why do they not also slam the military or the police for operating at a pure loss?

The city sewer system operates at a loss also.

For the record, the USPS turns a profit every year. The reason it appears to operate at a loss is the 2006 mandate that the USPS prefund the retiree benefits of its employees. No other government agency is required to do this, and no government agency (or corporation, for that matter) would do it voluntarily, for the obvious reason that it is much less costly to grow a retirement package over time using long-term investment strategies than it is to make the payment up front.

@kritiper That is a shitty analogy. :-)

@janbb it’s going down the drain . . . .

Government doesn’t make profit the way corporations do.

Some, like the Koch brothers, would love to privatize government so we’d have small government but the money would be contracted out to corporations. The goal of a corporation is to make profit so they can show their shareholders how efficient they are. That goal is contradictory to the goal of getting the roads plowed, getting the parks maintained, getting the prisons staffed, etc.

I really would not want military or police needing to make a profit. They already have a monopoly on violence, no need for them to use it to extract money from people.

Besides, the US Military paid for themselves by capturing Iraq for Halliburton.

Because the people who want the post office to fail are hypocritical ass hats.

@Zaku nailed it.

Don’t get too hung up on the ideological inconsistency. Most of these people would also love to see the military and police completely privatized as well.

@hmmmmmm We need go to war and we hire Putin ! Because we don’t have a standing army. Ha ha ha

They are ok with privatizing almost everything. Jails, fire departments, schools, probably police too. Justice? They support laws that put justice into the hands of the individual. That’s part of the gun laws. I’m all for being able to defend yourself, but some of them want the Wild West.

Plus, they latch on to whatever catches on. Someone decides USPS is worthless and bad for America, a lot of people just follow along and say ok my group says it’s not ok so it isn’t.

The desire to privatize the Post Office goes back to at least the 1980’s, as part of the Ronald Reagan-led movement to “starve the beast”, a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term “the beast”, in this context, refers to the United States Federal Government and the programs it funds, using mainly American taxpayer dollars, particularly social programs such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.