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| Crow crapping on a dead tree. |
That's my supper you're looking at.
The U.S. Postal Service announced the unthinkable today: On April 10, it will actually reduce the postal rates on most mail, including Forever Stamps, by more than 4%.
On April 11, you should expect a disaster of biblical proportions. Fire and brimstone from the sky, dogs and cats living together in peace -- that kind of stuff.
I've been predicting for more than a year that this wouldn't happen -- that somehow the temporary "exigent" postal increase would somehow become permanent. I even invented a word, "temporarely," noting that "temporary taxes or fees rarely expire."
The USPS did manage to win a legal battle that extended the surcharge, to the tune of a billion or so bucks that came out of mailers' hides. And it seemed to get widespread backing in Congress for making the surcharge permanent. But good luck getting Congress to actually approve anything these days except the naming of post offices.
The Postal Service, of course, isn't exactly going gently into the dark night of lower rates: "This mandatory action will worsen the Postal Service’s financial condition by reducing revenue and increasing its net losses by approximately $2 billion per year," its announcement whined.
Yeah, but at least the cafeteria at L'Enfant Plaza isn't serving crow, which will soon be the only item on the menu here at the Dead Tree Edition Research Institute.
Once the PMG gets Congressmen and Senators to understand that the true issue for them not passing a bill making the surcharge "part" of the base rate, is their massive volume of re-election mail may find that it will moves much slower with no warranty of getting into mailboxes by election day. The bill will then move faster than a cow eating Ex-lax, as they do not want to share the same fate as business mailers, forced to pay for untimely delivery of their message. The fabled "reg tag" to leapfrog the delivery log jam may even vanish in the rush to cut cost . . . OH MY.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that you allow your possible future dinner a bit for time to fatten, as I for one still believe as you have noted these things are not temporarity created and then gone.
This is the first drop in the price of a stamp since 1919. It had been raised from 2 to 3 cents in 1917 for W W I.
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