UnNews:US postage to fall in Spring
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US postage to fall in Spring |
2 March 2016
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The price of U.S. postage is set to fall on April 10. A stamp for a first-class letter will fall from 49 cents to 47.
Price drops are unheard-of. This is why county governments are the only organizations that can buy computers with both a keyboard and a screen, and banks must instead submit punched cards. American entrepreneurs never invent more efficient ways to do things, such as using foreign labor or sub-assemblies, as these ideas would surely violate some law or other.
In the case of the U.S. Postal Service, the price drop is not due to efficiency increases, of course. Rather, a 2013 law let the Postal Service increase the price of a stamp because of the business lost to the Great Recession. Congress enacted this to create yet another thing the nation could blame on George W. Bush. The law did not reflect the business lost to email, which was instead invented by Al Gore.
However, the law will expire once the Postal Service finishes sucking in $4,700 million. This will occur on April 10. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, known to all as Joe the Plumber, will mail the fateful letter that completes the sum and drops the price of a stamp, when he posts one of his monthly screeds to President Obama calling the President a foreign-born so-and-so who is wrecking the country.
Fortunately for Wurzelbacher, a hidebound postal clerk at the Maumee Post Office, near Toledo, will return the letter, stamped UNDELIVERABLE
, as it will have too much postage by 2 cents. Thus it will not be necessary to mobilize either the IRS or the Secret Service against Wurzelbacher.
Postmaster General Megan Brennan says the rate cut will be a "disaster" for the Postal Service. "Reducing our prices is irrational, considering our precarious financial condition," Brennan said in a press release written by someone else. Without the surcharge, stamp prices are pegged to inflation, something that has hardly occurred in the past few years. Thus, stamp prices have not gone up as fast as postal workers claiming Permanent Disability for paper cuts, filing grievances for hostile work environments, and seeing how slowly they can move during their 35-hour work weeks before they put in for their pension and switch to double-dip somewhere else in government. Brennan said the Postal Service should have more flexibility to set its own prices, though its customers have no flexibility at all to choose their own agency. Brennan said a private business that had lost most of its customers through bad service is free to raise its prices, so why not the Postal Service?
Sources[edit]
- Bob Bryan "The price of a US stamp is set to fall in April for the first time in 97 years". Yahoo! Finance (from NPR), March 2, 2016