Seen another way, when the cost of gas goes up 15 cents per gallon then USPS expenses increase by $18,150,000.

In the context of an entity that had revenues of nearly $75 billion in fiscal 2007, it might seem that $18 million or so is not a big deal. But the problem is that gas prices have not just risen by 15 centers per gallon.

According to the Energy Information Administration, gas today is priced at $3.663 per gallon. Two years ago the price was $2.966 per gallon. That’s a difference of $.697 per gallon. If you need to buy 121 million gallons your additional cost is almost $85 million.

The problem is that as bad as gas price increases have been in the past few years, they could get a lot worse. Think of $4 a gallon this summer — and $5, $6 or $7 in the next year or two. Now we’re talking about huge amounts of money for a delivery system which is dependent on gas, especially when you consider that the Postal Service says it had a $5.1 billion net loss in fiscal 2007.

Technorati Tags: costs, economics, mail, pricing

Our Founders had vision: the postal system in this country is so important that it’s actually included in the U.S. Constitution — Section 8 says that only Congress shall have the power to “to establish post offices and post roads.”

Why Congress? And why not the states? Because the Founders knew that unlike the situation in Europe, a single postal system with one set of standards and one set of prices could bind the national together. All citizens, no matter where they lived, would pay the same fee for the same services.

No less important, the U.S. postal system requires no payments from recipients. We have a sender-funded delivery system, meaning that senders take all the financial risk when they send materials through the mailstream. (In contrast, email recipients pay — that’s why it doesn’t matter if a spammer broadcasts 10 messages or a million emails, the cost is about the same.)

This is a site which says that the mailstream is important to the country, that we as a Nation are not so wealthy that we can afford to lose millions of jobs inside our borders and that a reasonable discussion of the mailing system is helped by the availability of factual information and data.

Technorati Tags: Constitution, economics, Founders, government, mail, Mail & Jobs, vision