The United States Post Office is a train wreck.The fumbling, stumbling government agency which gets subsidies reaching into the billions of dollars every year (thanks to the taxpayers' generosity) STILL lost $2.4 billion in just the last quarter. In fact, the USPS guesses that the total net loss for the year will reach $7 billion! And they're already in debt to the tune of $10 billion.
So, good golly, Miss Molly; why did President Obama so foolishly remind Americans of the government's ineptness to do business during one of his carefully-controlled town hall meetings last week?
Team Obama may have weeded out contrary voices before the event but they obviously didn't think to weed out the dopey comments the Prez comes up with he's off teleprompter. The damage was done (and big time) not by some heckler but by Obama himself.
Here's a couple of choice responses to the President's bonehead play.
* From Caroline Baum at Bloomberg.com --
When Obama compared the post office to UPS and FedEx, he was clearly hoping to assuage voter concerns about a public health-care option undercutting and eliminating private insurance.
What he did instead was conjure up visions of long lines and interminable waits. Why do we need or want a health-care system that works like the post office?
What’s more, if the USPS is struggling to compete with private companies, as Obama implied, why introduce a government health-care option that would operate at the same disadvantage?
* And from John Stossel at ABC News --
Obama brought up the post office last week, in attempt to show how a public health plan would not eliminate private ones.
"If you think about it, UPS and FedEX are doing just fine... it's the post office that's always having problems. There's nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private market place as long as... it's not set up where the government is basically being subsidized by the taxpayers."
But the post office IS government subsidized, to the tune of billions a year. Does Obama not know that?
Does Obama believe that when the new “health care co-ops” go broke, or just try to save money by not buying someone a new hip, that Congress won’t rush in with your tax money to bail the co-ops out?
His mistake is telling. If he didn't notice that the Post Office, despite providing worse service than UPS and FedEX, is bailed out by Congress, will he notice when a government-run health care plan is feeding off billions of your tax dollars?
Or would he care? Before the election he supported a single payer system. Subsidized co-ops would be an easy back-door way to achieve the same thing.
But at least he's willing to criticize the post office. On that note, economist Justin Ross points out on his blog how, for 44 cents, you could mail a letter via USPS - or buy a kiwi fruit that had to be grown and watered in New Zealand, picked, carefully packaged, and shipped across the world to a store near you.
That's the spontaneous order of the free market at work. I hope it will still be allowed to work for American health care.
