U.S. Postal Service and General Mail Topics

This thread is to discuss general issues surrounding the United States Postal Service, mail/parcel delivery, the decline in first class letters corresponding with the increased use of email and other electronic communications, tax and revenue considerations, and so forth.

OP edited by moderation. Original below.

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http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/24/local/la-me-cap-email-tax-20130325

So this councilman believes that taxing e-mail will help keep the US Post Office afloat and do something about all of the scammers and spammers. Personally I don't really like the idea, but is it possibly a good idea or just bunk?

edited 28th Mar '13 2:22:16 PM by Fighteer

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

I'll open this for discussion on this limited scope. I'd rather we have a general "U.S. Post Office" thread where the broader topics can be discussed.

An email tax to support the USPS is simply never going to happen. It's impossible to enforce, for one thing. I like the idea of using it to stop spammers, but how would you make them pay? They mostly use hijacked computers anyway, so the burden would fall on the owners of those systems, assuming you could detect the traffic in the first place.

edited 28th Mar '13 7:16:55 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

This whole idea sounds like it came from someone who isn't part of the tech generation, doesn't know how e-mail works, and doesn't use it as a primary communication method, or a communication method at all outside of work. He seems to see it as something that is limited to businesses and the occasional message home. Not something that people actually use personally on a daily basis.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

This sounds quite a bit like taxing toilet paper to keep the newspaper industry afloat.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Technical issues aside, federal law already prohibits email taxes.

Eh, this new law would simply repeal that.

The original article described an action being proposed by a local city council in California.

Supremacy Clause says "bzzzzzt!"

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It won't work. Many sites that people sign up for to get email newsletters or whatever would probably go under since no one is going to pay taxes to get updates on a topic or pay taxes on an email they got when they do a password recovery.

We get lots of legit email all the time and that proposal would kill email.

Remember, these idiots drive, fuck, and vote. Not always in that order.

The involvement of US Postal Service made me think that he's suggesting a federal law. It would make more sense to have a federal law, in any case.

Also, apparently that act has an expiration date:

...of course, that does nothing if you're sending an e-mail overseas, or you're not even in the US and have a .com e-mail address, does it?

Keep Rolling On

Yeah, there'd be a huge problem with foreigners using Gmail.com and hotmail.com accounts. The American government would be taxing Canadians with this, and that wouldn't go over very well. Also, Facebook.

edited 28th Mar '13 10:10:19 AM by Zendervai

Not Three Laws compliant.

Gah, there's no point to benefiting the post office to the detriment of the rest of society, and email has so many benefits over regular mail for most things. If you really feel a need to improve the standing of the postal service, work on its competitiveness against UPS and Fed Ex for packages, which boom due to internet retailing, I say.

She of Short Stature & Impeccable Logic My Skating Liveblog

In Canada, Canadapost isn't doing that badly, because it's cheaper and has the same "success rate" as Fedex and UPS. Actually, considering how often UPS has screwed up for my family, we tend to go with Canadapost just because it works.

Not Three Laws compliant.

I didn't bring this up because I honestly thought someone else would do so immediately, but this thread probably shouldn't go too far without mentioning that the USPS's financial crisis is entirely artificial. Remove the onerous budgetary constraints upon it (being forced to save up too much of its money for future retiree benefit payments) and it's wholly 'fiscally responsible' for the next few decades at a minimum, even considering the legitimate issues stemming from it having to compete with the internet. So any argument that stems from 'should we enact [random tax] to help out the post office because it can't possible survive without a revenue increase' is, at its heart, a flawed premise.

That being said, I am not philosophically opposed to the idea of taxing e-mails in and of itself - provided that those taxes are enacted sensibly, with reasonable sets of exceptions and limitations, and don't penalize normal users for engaging in inexpensive, ordinary e-mail usage. Mind you, I'm not sure if the current legislative body has the technical know-how to enact such laws in the first place. Certainly, a generic tax on all e-mail messages in general would be hilariously awful.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

The only reason that the USPS isn't so far in the black it's printing money is because they're required to keep enough funds on hand to cover fifty years of pensions. They're making plenty of money. Congress just decided to fuck them over for no apparent reason.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Well, first class mail delivery has seen a significant decline in recent years thanks to the Internet, and the USPS is not allowed by law to charge as much in postage as it costs to deliver a first class letter. The pension funding thing is the major reason why it's insolvent, however.

Mod mode: We need to either keep this thread on-topic — that is, about email taxes — or broaden the subject to mail delivery in general.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Why would we want to maintain the paper mail system? Putting text onto dead trees and then waiting days while a car burns dead algae to take it to its destination is terribly slow, inefficient and wasteful. I don't see why we would want to encourage it.

Join my forum game!

I'd broaden the subject if I were you, Fighteer. Focused subjects tend to die off quickly or eventually get off topic by turning to a more general issue that includes the original topic.

Good luck sending a parcel over the internet.

A reliable postal service is essential for e-commerce. This just happens to be a silly way of trying to preserve it.

Also, contacting politicians and other officials with physical letters is much more effective than easily-ignorable zero-effort email.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I've got no problem with the topic being widened to mail delivery in general.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Thread title changed and OP edited.

For the record, even if they were to enact an email tax, email itself is rapidly becoming obsolete for simple communication. Text messages, IM chat clients, and threaded social media are ascendant.

If I had to pay a fee to send personal email, I'd probably never do it again unless it was mandatory; I'd just switch to Facebook, Twitter, or some other mechanism.

edited 28th Mar '13 2:20:37 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

@Meklar: As has been mentioned, parcels can't be delivered over email. I ordered things off Amazon recently, and two of them were delivered via the USPS. We ship more than paper. And I still get things like birthday cards regularly from my immediate family, and I don't think that's going to die out soon. As well as getting bank statements and my paychecks. (As my current jobs involves working at several different places that change with the seasons and it takes like an hour to get to their main office, I don't go and pick up my paycheck in person very often.)

So. Yeah. There are still fairly practical reasons to not phase out physical mail delivery, because there's things that can't be done over the internet, or things that people don't feel entirely safe doing over the internet.

And that's exactly why Facebook and Twitter might put their weight behind a proposal like this. They'd much rather everyone be forced to use their channels instead of an open standard.

So what? Taxing electronic messages just because the same system that transports dead tree messages happens to transport some other things too strikes me as incredibly twisted reasoning.

I'm not saying to deliberately shut it down. I'm just saying the idea that it needs to be somehow 'protected' from advancing technology is kind of ridiculous. If it is still useful, then let it serve for those uses. But specifically trying to keep it afloat artificially by restricting the alternatives is another matter entirely.

Join my forum game!

The problem with declining postal services is that - in most first-world states - are primarily owned by The State. Communication workers are employees of the State, and are, therefore, public-sector workers. Think of the outcry there would be if communication services were scaled back.

For example, here, Royal Mail is trying to become part-privatised. But that isn't going down well.