Preserving postal service will necessitate trade-offs

The nation can survive with- out Saturday mail delivery. Not that we would want to, but its one of the alternatives to a drastic restructuring that would be even more painful.

The U.S. Postal Service is going through a financial crisis, showing losses of $8.5 billion last year and a projected loss of more than $6 billion this year.

There are some who say that much of those losses are creations of bookkeeping — a reflection of increased demands for the Postal Service to fund projected retiree benefits and health care costs. But those costs will be real soon enough, and the postal service must either begin paying for them now, negotiating contracts that would reduce future costs or contemplate arriving at a day when retired postal employees would not receive the benefits they anticipated.

The only point on which everyone should be able to agree is that the status quo is not acceptable.

Various factions in Congress are putting together their proposals, and President Barack Obama has unveiled an administration plan. Obma’s plan would allow the Postal Service to reduce service to five days a week and would adjust payments toward advance funding of retirement benefits. It would also allow the Postal Service to expand its product base and increase rates without seeking congressional approval.

Saving jobs and service

The trade off would be a welcome development for cities like Youngstown that are facing the loss of major postal distribution centers and for thousands of a communities that face the prospect of losing their post offices.

The work the postal service does and the services it provides are evolving in an electronic age — much as it is in other industries.

But the postal service traces its roots as a government or quasi-governmental institution to the very earliest days of the republic. As such, it cannot be subject to a sink-or-swim rule. It provides buoyancy for too many people and too many businesses. Institutions evolve all the time, but few institutions have been caught up in the kind of technical revolution that is undercutting the postal service’s foundation.

Perhaps the postal service has not been as aggressive as it should have been in addressing its financial problems, but it has cut its staff by about 130,000 and reduced its costs by $12 billion.

And it has done so while continuing to move a piece of mail from any Point A in the United States to any Point B for the price of a 44-cent stamp. It does so with an efficiency and at a cost that is the envy of much if not all of the world.

That’s something worth saving, and something that must be saved for those who still rely on postal service.