My father was kind enough to give me an allowance. When I was nine, it topped out at a dollar a week, which got paid out about every other week if I was lucky. And if I misbehaved, the payments went away for however long Murtha thought was long enough to teach me a lesson.
It was simple economics, and I can apply some of the same lessons to the current difficulties experienced by the United States Postal Service.
To set a level, a first-class stamp sells for 78 cents. Ten years ago, the same stamp sold for 49 cents. That’s a 62 percent increase. USPS doesn’t technically receive federal funding, it’s supposed to operate with the revenue it generates from the sale of postage, and charges for services. In Fiscal Year 2025, USPS lost $9 billion. It lost 9.5 billion in 2024. Somebody has to pay those clerks and postmen and women, as well as the Postmaster General, who has a salary of $346,780, not counting bonuses and incentive pay. What the hell are the incentives? A bonus if you don’t lose $10 billion?
USPS is allowed to borrow from the U.S. Treasury—up to a point. Their total debt limit cannot exceed $15 billion, borrowed from the Federal Financing Bank. The FFB is a government corporation that’s supposed to make the cost of borrowing cheaper for us taxpayers. It borrows money from the U.S. Treasury. So USPS, which isn’t federally funded, exists on money borrowed from the FFB, which gets its money from the Treasury.
Like many entities that are under financial duress, a chunk of the troubles at the USPS come from the fact that they’re paying a lot of people to do nothing. (I’m living, in part, on a decent pension from the company I made a career with, so I’m not finding fault with that process, per se.)
Here’s another funky abbreviation for you—OPEB. The Postal Service has retirement and Other Post Employment Benefit costs of more than $120 billion. In order to save money, the USPS was told to bring down labor costs. They fired a lot of people, and told the already disenfranchised remaining employees to do the work that more people previously hadn’t finished. After they fired those people, they began paying them Post Employment Benefits. Those benefits include a health plan, dental and vision, life insurance, long-term care insurance, retirement counseling, and other perks. That all costs more borrowed money. A good estimate says that over 700,000 retired USPS employees are receiving some combination of those benefits.
David Steiner took over as Postmaster General in 2025. He’s used his pulpit to get the word out that things aren’t good. They’re so bad, Steiner says, that if radical change isn’t made immediately, USPS will be unable to operate, perhaps as soon as next spring.
I’d like to offer some generic fixes that might buy Steiner a year or two. First, don’t worry about picking up your mail on Saturday. One less delivery day is at least a 14 percent savings in hours and associated costs. Post Office buildings are about the darkest places you can work, so the electricity savings aren’t going to be big, but it’s a start.
Next, we have what I’ll call the Junk Pay Up. My wife, for one example, receives at least four requests for money from charitable organizations every week. She’s brought this upon herself to some extent, but her good will can’t account entirely for the pile of mail she gets, whose senders aren’t paying their weight. No more, Easter Seals and Cancer Society. Your paper pleas are now being sold at the going rate—and we may institute a further monetary penalty. We’ll begin charging an extra fee for solicitation mail. Similarly, the grocery flier’s mailing cost just tripled.
Earlier this week I paid close to $11 to send my child a jump drive with computer files. As a part of my Save USPS plan, that mailing will cost about $15, and that stamp you just paid 78 cents for is going to 95. (That’s Steiner’s suggestion, not mine, but we just have to do it.)
Further belt-tightening is going to be unfairly borne by our friends who live outside established neighborhoods, towns and cities. One of the least efficient and most costly parts of home delivery is “rural delivery,” or what was once called “Rural Free Delivery.” It was never free, and it’ll no longer exist.
There’s always privatization. Would selling off assets and letting an entrepreneur deliver your utility bill cost more than it does now? Probably, but it might work, for a couple of years, which is what it seems we have left under the current system. I’ll do Steiner’s job for a third of his pay, sink or swim.
