The Republicans are constantly harping about how ineffective it is to have businesses run by political processes. In most cases I agree with them in that regard. Just look at the many military contractors and their infamous $10,000 toilet seats to see an example of that.  Every person in congress has his hand out when it comes to our bloated military budgets. Things run by political processes is kind of like making decisions by a committee and we all saw how the congressional super committee was at that. One of those cases  of running a business as a political process is the post office or as they are known the USPS.

Every congressmen wants to see the post office being run on at least a small profit but none of them want to see any of the offices in their district closed to make that happen.  I just finished reading an article in our small local paper where my congressmen who is a Republican says he is in favor of closing post offices but thinks the USPS is making a mistake by closing the ones his voters use. Here are some of his words for not closing his offices:

That doesn’t even count the fact that businesses rely on the local post office to make sure they have time-sensitive pieces of mail delivered.  From a practical standpoint, if you don’t have a local post office, it could definitely affect you. 

I live in a rural area in his district and I can tell you that about the only mail I get now is of the junk variety. (I wonder how many millions of trees would be saved if we even did away with that mail?) Any of the few pieces that aren’t junk would not upset my life if they took an extra day to get here. Most of them are bills; and even most of  my bills now come through email 🙂  But there might be once or twice a year, but for the life of me I can’t remember any, that I might get time sensitive mail so there may be a grain of truth in my congressman’s statement. (Wouldn’t that be a first 😉  ). A couple of the post offices that my congressman is disputing closure that I personally know about are in very small towns where they are actually the only business left in the town.  For that reason the locals probably congregate there to gossip about their neighbors when they have nothing else to do; maybe they really need a senior citizen center instead of a post office. Which one would be cheaper?

I suppose if congress had control of UPS or FedEx they would insist on having local store fronts in every small town too. I do much of my non-grocery purchases through the internet and that means that most of that is delivered via UPS. The nearest UPS center is about 20 miles away but that does not prevent them from making the typical two-day delivery from the virtual storefront to my rural address.

I think the bottom line in this is that my congressman, like all of his compatriots,  just wants to get re-elected and will do whatever is necessary and say whatever it takes to make that happen.

But what do I know….