From One Liberal to Another, Shame on You: 10 Flaws in the Latest Do-Not-Mail Initiative

Flaw 8: Being Realistic
Another question I posed to Paglia centered on his ideas for how the USPS should reinvent itself and not subject poor letter carriers to delivering those nasty catalogs and other junk mail anymore. Paglia referred to a new USPS “2.0.”

“It’s clear that the USPS is in trouble now,” he said. “They’re looking at a $1 billion loss now due to less use of First Class mail. Do Not Mail is one of the many things they need to address. We don’t want people to be out of jobs and have this be a catastrophic event in the life of the USPS. It can give the USPS more flexibility and make them not dependent on not sending mail to people who don’t want it.”

To that, I followed up by asking him just how he can realistically expect the USPS to be reinvented when it took more than a decade to get postal reform signed into law just a little more than a year ago. How would an employer of more than 800,000 be revamped successfully without being able to live off the income generated from Standard mail?

“When 89 percent of people polled support a Do Not Mail service because they are sick and tired of being inundated with junk mail that they do not want and can’t control, we have a serious problem and this is a very precarious (to say nothing of the environmental impacts) business model, and the USPS has put its workers in jeopardy by pursuing it,” he said. “Should the USPS be allowed to annoy a nation, wreck untold environmental havoc, contribute to identity theft, etc., to preserve jobs aimed at delivering unwanted mail or can we find a better way forward? I think we can find a better way.”