Orsidgenag
25086
1287
10
Sep 8, 2026 11:11 PM
Orsidgenag
25086
1287
10
NKato
I really wanna beat the writers at The Economist.
EroticZombiePants
This poll is clearly an older one.
DriverIRQnotlessOrEqual
Government has been trying their best to get people to hate the USPS so they can change it to a private service
nimeton0
khaoselement
The USPS around me sucks ass. A wretched amount too. It's basically a guarantee that any package that ships through them will be late and/or delivered to the wrong place. Fucking worthless service.
BlindGardener
So fund it better.
Smidge204
I mean, the US military has in fact literally lost billions in cash stacked on shipping pallets airdropped into the middle of nowhere, so...
manystripes
The Hero of Canton strikes again
ItsATrap
Consequently, this is why the MAGA idea of running the government "like a business" is dumb. What is the product, who are the customers, what counts as profit? If you cut services for your customers (read: citizens) you are saving money for your stakeholders, who are also your citizens, at the expense of your citizens to appease your citizens. Its stupid and doesn't make sense. Its not a business and anyone telling you it is is either a moron or trying to rip you off.
or0b0ur0s
Oh, the military makes money all right. They just pay for the op with our money, then the One Percent get the money from whatever's worth selling in the country we just bombed. Smedley Butler tried to tell us almost a century ago.
SofaH3ro
The postal service was made a government monopoly to generate revenue. If it were done today, the founding fathers would have probably nationalized oil like so many other countries.
Bubbells
The only thing I have found is that they take longer than my ups deliveries
PenguinNamedWobbles
The USPS is often essentially used as a hedge financial method of employing people like vets that might go homeless unless they find stable reasonable employment. It still collects some money so it's not a full cost solution, but still far more effective than sinking 20-30+ billion gifting it to ngos pretending to provide homeless services while pocketing 500k plus salaries.
Whooa
Didn’t it used to make money? Like it was sandbagged by congress or something?
Blimymyhat
This is like the guy trying to sell me on their cellphone network based on how their stock price is doing.
OKSasquatch
manystripes
Fire departments are also very well liked despite never turning a profit
Lycanthian
I just wish they would stop treating the "pay extra for express shipping" option as the "please lose this package and ensure it arrives a week late" option :(
Azazellosarmour
England privatized under Thacher and it all but devastated the UK. Why would we want to repeat the same mistake?
Yuri909
The military is literally losing money lmao
override367
USPS used to be usable as a bank and give small loans to poor people
slimvictor
I use this meme when I teach framing in my uni classes. It's very clear.
TheLastSpaceman
Anyone talks about post office losing money should immediately be punched.
Hurtmeplenty69
https://media2.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1aDd1ZXprOWtzenB2b2lnZ25uMnRsNXNzYzBxamFqNDNjcHF2ZjN2YyZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/vcKEsYOdjoCeJRpn95/200w.webp
CALAMOSCOPYJANE
Ditto schools, Medicare, and any other similar govt service.
I remember when the neoliberal ethos - that everything should be run as a business - took hold on the late 90s, and thinking: this is _not_ going to turn out will for anybody. Not even the people ostensibly profiting from it.
BlindGardener
Point of order, I say that the military loses 750 billion a year. And I’ve never killed any cyclops.
UltraLincoln
Without the USPS and their military offices nobody could afford to send anything to their family members in the military overseas.
Head to another courier and see how much it costs to send a small package or even just a letter to another country.
UltraLincoln
One reason they hate the USPS is all the regulations and laws around mail. If a government agency wants to read your mail or open your packages, they have to go through a bunch of red tape and leave a paper trail.
There are no such protections around private couriers like FedEx and UPS.
VindictiveBathToaster
Given that the US Military and DoD have failed their audit multiple concurrent years, I’d say they do lose money. Lots of it.
LaffertyDanie1
Maybe try reading the fucking article instead of jumping on the headline. Pretty sure this is for a piece they did back in 2020 and the gist or more that it could be run better (which is pretty undebatable) but is important to our democracy and trump shouldn't be fucking with it for politically motivated reasons
mikeatike
I mean I am saying the military loses trillions of our dollars, yes.
Sebastopol140
Next: OMG, roads cost money!!!
imnotinthewitnessprotectionprogram
Omg, billionaires cost sooo much monies
StellarJay77
It blows my fucking mind that people just have no concept of how a functioning government should work where tax dollars are viewed as an investment in the health and wellbeing of our society by paying for public services that benefit everyone. So it's not about how much it costs at all but how much it helps everyone to live better. It's always been a trickle up economy but rich fucks figured out that starting a culture war distracts everyone while they steal the labour value from us.
Hiynastrike
Police cost money... Sanitation costs money.... It's almost as if the nature of Government is to collect money and distribute it back out as services. Now if only there were some kind of nasty word to describe this process that power hungry jerks could use to conflate Government with Stalinism
ILoveThiPlatform
"American roads lose BILLIONS yet our incompetent government keep sinking money into them EVERY YEAR!!!!"
GodHelpMeToBeGood
I better subscribe to quality road service. Oh dang clean water premium? Oh wow human composted foods? The future is definitely owned by the snake oil salesman.
maincarrot
Delete the roads!!!
whatsisname
This is a bad example because when you dig into municipal finances you'll find that roads are generally overbuilt and aren't catalyzing enough economic activity to actually pay for their upkeep.
IHaveGreatKittenRecipes
Depends highly on the roads. Generally roads in an area are all built on similar schedules with similar construction methods, which on the surface sounds great but in reality often means the 'popular' roads are *fuuucked* within a couple years because they have 20x the traffic of your local cul-de-sac. But because *that* road was actually overbuilt the road suffering the damage gets fewer repairs, which is why we think our roads suck. They do, but only the ones everyone uses.
whatsisname
I'm not talking about e.g. concrete vs asphalt. Imagine the bit of street in front of a house. The property taxes on that house should be raising enough to maintain that street perpetually, lets imagine they are. But say you double the width of the street, and make it extra wide for easier parking or something. You've now basically doubled the cost of maintaining it, but it's not like the wider street is going to raise the value of that property anywhere near enough to levy that needed cost.
whatsisname
Then imagine making the length per house even wider, i.e. wider lots, so each house is responsible for even more pavement. And spreading the houses out means you need to pay even more for more water, sewer, etc, but the values aren't going to be high enough to actually pencil out the finances on maintaining that. And before long the roads really area just a money pit and an albatross around the neck of every municipal finance office.
whatsisname
And the USA just takes that to the extreme with colossal amounts of pavement without enough economic activity surrounding it to actually justify the expense https://maps.app.goo.gl/SVqAoJzNUp7HaQ558 I just picked at random, there are shitloads of intersections like that
whatsisname
* roads as the USA has been building them, aka suburban sprawl
ouroborus777
Maybe we *should* frame military as $750b in losses.
Nightcaste
For-profit military seems like a bad idea
Unclescam
They lose about 150b dollars into the ether with no clue where it went every year...
MrHappyDude
I believe it's $1.2T this year
FallenJester
Considering how they cant seem to pass an audit....
epicfail48
Or win
flounder35
More like 1.5 trillion
mikeatike
Yea, this image is old as fuck. We've stated several wars in the last couple years.
Dasnekones
Also, the reason the USPS is "losing money" is because the Republicans are fucking with the numbers and forcing USPS to pre-fund retirement healthcare benefits which essentially front loads all the expenses before the return and obviously no other federal organisation needs to do this.
If you correct this accounting trick then USPS actually makes money last I checked and its damn rare for a gov organisation to MAKE money outside of taxation.
So yeah, this is a conspiracy against USPS.
UltraLincoln
Before they screwed up the budget like you said, USPS was famous for covering their own budget entirely with service charges and stamps. It didn't make money, but it didn't cost the taxpayers a single penny. I thought that was success.
TheNoirAntagonist
The post office has to do this because its operational funds are locked up because of a bill passed in the 70s with the rise of corporate influence after the post war reconstruction era. Much of its operational costs come from selling stamps & other collectables & donations. but there was a significant rise in costs to the average Americans that further pushed privatization of transit servers like the UPS and later FedEx and Amazon. We need to fund it, schools and other things and tax corps.
flounder35
That law was repealed in 2022
Dasnekones
Yeah read up on it now and quite frankly the situation has gotten complicated enough that i cant honestly comment on it anymore
Badprenup
Tbf, the tweet is from 2020. Commenter may not be up to date but they were correct about the cause lol
Navrodel
The same exact image gets reposted every 2 months for 6 years, and the response is practically reflexive by now: tear down the argument in the context that it was made in order to make it clear that all the attacks on USPS have been disingenuous the entire time.
At this point the response is as memetic as the image, so it's going to keep getting repeated as often as the bad argument about USPS losing money is.
FermentTheRich3000
It actually makes money, plus for a dollar, I can put an envelope in my front yard and within a week, it appears anywhere I want in the country. Fucking amazing.
Iamatinylittlebanana
Another cause of losses is they are required to deliver to every usa address, 1st class costs same where every the letter goes
FermentTheRich3000
No, that is a cost of the public service being for , ahem, EVERYONE.
battery1979
And within about two weeks, anywhere in the world.
astrangehop
Plus while you're totally screwed for the first few years in terms of route and hours, postal workers seem to have a decent retirement plan and start out at much more than state park workers get
WillUleimi
I just had to adjust my mindset and accept that I was going to be royally fucked for the first 2 years, but everything will end up right as rain.
3 years in and it was totally worth it. Now it is me deciding to fuck myself by being on the OT list instead of being forced to work 60 hours a week lol
I just bought a (basically) brand new Supra, so life is pretty good.
Shazoozle
In almost at a year in. I’m sticking it out because I know what I’m going to get and while the work is…eh, the works fine. Supervisors are fucking terrible. I’ll survive.
StellarJay77
It's because mail in voting is by far the hardest method of voting to fuck with on a scale that would make any difference in any election without being noticed just due to the number of people it would involve would make it effectively impossible without leaving some evidence of tampering.
MagicalScientist
That, but also didn't DeJoy have some stake in stuff like fedex and ups, in the same way that that person in charge of education had stake in private schools?
StellarJay77
It's a massive onion of corruption and voter suppression... It has many layers.
hyperchondriac
Simply discarding mail ballots at random would favor Republicans since democrats vote by mail at significantly higher rates. It's such a big difference that if they eliminated the mail in ballots, no other form of tampering would be needed in this election cycle.
All SCOTUS has to do is say the USPS doesn't have to deliver the ballots after we've already voted and we're fucked, and it doesn't seem like anyone is pointing this out on any news source (because SCOTUS would NEVER *gasp* /s)
StellarJay77
This is categorically untrue. There are entire states who primarily vote by mail, both Republican and Democrat states. Also the military primarily votes through mail and the majority of military personelle are Republicans.
hyperchondriac
No. Here's my source.
https://statesunited.org/resources/americans-vote-by-mail-2024/
There are statistically a higher proportion of Democrat voters by mail than Republicans in the last 2 general elections. Unless the statistics shown here are lies.
StellarJay77
The difference is statistically even depending on which state you're looking at as these stats only accounts for a median average nation wide which won't have much of an impact one way or another on actual election results. This also doesn't take into account any military voters or any American citizens who are living outside of the continental US. If voting by mail ended tomorrow everywhere it would have no impact on the end results. Reps are targetting high Dem voting centers only.