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_Monopoly of the Postal Service _
By: Anonymous
Monopoly of the Postal Service In the United States economy most markets can
be classified into four different markets structures. But, each and every
market in the United States is completely unique from the others. Generally
the best type of market structure for the general public is per-fect
competition because it creates the lowest possible price for the public. There
are some exceptions were perfect competition isn’t the best choice for the
public on account of various reasons. The United States Postal Service is one
of them and since the Postal Service is a monopoly, it is its own market. This
paper will discuss the budget dilemmas that the postal service has faced for
the past twenty years and if it is in the best interest of the economy for the
United States Postal Service to continue as a monopoly. The first time there
was talk of privatizing the Postal Service was in 1979 when the Postal Service
was losing vast amounts of money in the long run. But since the Postal Service
is a necessity for America, the government had to subsidize the service in
order for it to continue in operation. In 1979 the United States Postal
Service had a cash flow of $22.5 Billion and was additionally receiving $176
million from investing(#1, Intro). Even with this added revenue the Postal
Service was still greatly under funded on its own (#1, Intro). During this
time it was discussed to privatize the postal service and introduce
competition because of the extreme losses that the service was experiencing. A
positive argument for privatizing the Postal Service was with numerous
competitors in the market there would be more efficiency and the public would
receive lower prices. But this would also increase the usage of resources, for
example airplanes and cars. One of the problems the Post Office had was its
receipts from consumer purchases that were submitted the next day after the
transaction (#1, i). If the receipts were submitted earlier the postal service
would receive more money because they could invest that money sooner (#1, i).
Another way the Postal Service could increased profits was by competitively
selecting banks that would give them higher interest rates and such (#1, ii).
Probably the most relevant and final way to improve the budget of the Postal
Service is to improve the bookkeeping poli-cies and banking techniques (#1,
ii). Not only did the Post Service propose to increase profits but they also
proposed to cut costs in a number of ways. There were three methods that were
proposed in 1946 for the protection of salaries that no longer exists (#2,
Intro). These have to do with the rural mail carriers. Under this antiquated
method of delivering mail the Postal Service was los-ing money to any mail
that went to "rural" areas (#2, i) There are 48,000 mail carriers that deliver
mail to millions of families that are considered to be living in rural
settings; this costs the postal Service 858 million dollars a year (#2, i).
This is a fairly easy problem to fix considering how much money is being lost.
It was proposed that money loss could be significantly cut down if the Postal
Service corrected the following problems. The rural mail carriers were
assigned a certain amount of time to deliver to a specific rural area, this
method was out of date and because of this the carriers have free time for
which they got paid for (#2, ii). The next problem was that other mail routes
based pay on how many miles the route covered, so the carriers were getting
paid by the mile (#2, iii). With this problem fixed the Postal Service could
saved 26.8 million a year (#2, iii). There was also an hourly rate that was in
effect which indirectly promoted inefficient service (#2, iii). A stop to this
could have saved the Postal Service $255,000 a year (#2, iii). From the
num-bers mentioned above, it can be seen why the United States Postal Service
was losing so much money. These problems did indeed eventually did get solved
over the past fifteen years and now the Postal Service is making record
breaking profits. Now in the first quarter of the fiscal year 1996 the Postal
Service already has a net income of $1.2 billion (#3, 1). Now not only is the
Postal Service just breaking even, but they are also making a profit. On top
of that, the 1.2 billion dollar figure is 115 billion dollars better then the
quarterly forecast predicted (#3,1). It is incredible that they are not only
making a reasonable profit but it is increasing over the years. The Postal
Service is also now reducing debts. An example of this is when the Postal
Service redeemed a 1.5 billion dollar loan two years in advance which will
save them 22 million dollars of interest in the next two years (#3,1). The
Postal Service isn’t stopping with the revenue that it is receiving now. The
Postal Service is planning to increase its international revenues of $1.2
billion by twice the amount in the next five years and ten-fold by the year
2005 (#5, 1). The Postal Service is continually working to "streamline" their
operations for the future that they are now run-ning. The Postal Service is
continualy looking to cut back on borrowing money. All of the recent financial
borrowing has been through the Federal Financing Bank, but the Postal Service
now is looking into outside sources, such as bonds in the public markets (#5,
2). Business are starting to get jealous of the Postal Service because of the
great prof-its it is experiencing. The Postal Service is now making a major
impact on the United States Economy (#6, 1). Business are pointing out that in
1995 the Postal Service had records of $1.8 billion in net income and a 1.7
billion dollar debt reduction (#6, 1). The $54 billion revenue that the Postal
Service is bringing in would put them in 12th place on the Fortune 500 list
and 33rd on the Fortune Global 500, with the worlds largest corpora-tions
(#6,1). A recent study showed that domestic direct mail sales were at $333
billion in the year 1994 (#6,1). This figure is expected to reach over $500
billion by the year 2000 (#6,1). It can be seen throughout this paper how the
United States Postal Service in-creased profits and does not have to borrow as
much money as before. It seems that the Postal Service is doing just fine
while it is a monopoly. But there are still two arguments for and against the
Postal Service continuing to remain a monopoly. On one side compe-tition is
thought to make industries in the market more efficient and practice more
innova-tive (#4, 1). But on the other hand the competition is also thought to
lead to "a wide-spread cream skimming, with the postal service left only the
high-cost, unprofitable markets (#4, 1)." So who is to know which market would
be better for the American economy as far as the Postal Service goes. But it
is speculated if the United States Postal Service does keep increasing its
profits over the years, maybe it will be privatized.
_Bibliography _
Bibliography 1) United States. "General Accounting Office, Changes in the U.S.
Postal Service's cash management practices could increase income and reduce
cost": report / by the U.S. General Accounting Office, Washington: General
Accounting Office,","1979 2) United States. General Accounting Office,
"Changes needed in the United States Postal Service's rural carrier pay
systems": report / by the U.S. General Account-ing Office, Washington: General
Accounting Office, 1978 3) http://www.usps.gov/news/press/96/96002new.htm 4)
http://nutcweb.tpc.nwu.edu/research/abstracts/i.2.html 5)
http://www.usps.gov/news/press/95/95090new.htm 6)
http://www.usps.gov/news/press/95/95095new.htm
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