HUFFINGTON
07.22.12
AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE
GOINGPOSTAL
er it’s going from New York City
to Greenwich, Conn., or from New
York City to Anchorage, Ak.
Those letters generate the bulk
of the postal service’s budget. Highdensity areas subsidize low-density
areas, and the short deliveries subsidize the long ones. The letter you
mail across the city for 45 cents
helps underwrite the letter you mail
across the country for 45 cents.
The internet has disrupted this
system, however. Though the volume of package deliveries has shot
up with the rise of e-commerce,
it’s not enough to replace the huge
losses from the decline in firstclass mail. Online billpay, in particular, has sucked business away
from the agency, as has the worst
recession in decades.
“It’s been unrelenting,” Donahoe says of the fall in first-class
mail. “We’re off almost 30 percent over the last five years, from
where it was at the end of 2006.”
The postal service has another
unique — and some would say
more pressing — problem. In 2006,
before the housing crash and the
Great Recession, Congress passed a
law requiring the agency to pay for
the health care benefits of its retirees decades in advance, putting the
agency on the hook for $5.5 billion
a year in payments — a requiremen