On September 17th, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (D-VT) went on Facebook Live to announce their introduction of the Postal Banking Act, a bill that would have the US Postal Service provide a “public option” in some retail banking services.

President Trump reignited a feud last week when he said the “Postal Service is a joke because they’re handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies and every time they bring a package, they lose money on it.”

Mail volumes are falling and the U.S. Postal Service is losing billions of dollars a year while accumulating large liabilities.

The U.S. Postal Service has been losing money for more than a decade. Its financial outlook is bleak, with $110 billion in unfunded retirement costs and more liabilities accruing every year.

The U.S. Postal Service is in a growing financial crisis as mail volume continues to plunge. The Government Accountability Office says that a “comprehensive package of actions is needed to improve USPS’s financial viability.”

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is a major business enterprise operated by the federal government.

This is a really bad policy idea: the U.S. Postal Service wants to get into the grocery delivery business. Economists will sometimes support government interventions in industries where there are serious market failures. But with grocery delivery, private businesses are already performing the service, and no market failure is evident.

The U.S. Postal Service announced today that it intends to end Saturday mail delivery beginning on August 1st. According to the USPS, the move would save the government’s beleaguered mail monopoly $2 billion a year. The USPS has lost over $40 billion since 2006 and it has maxed out its $15 billion line of credit with the U.S. Treasury. With mail volume in permanent decline, the USPS has no choice but to try and cut costs.

Postmaster General Michael Donahoe has occasionally remarked that the U.S. Postal Service will end up in a Greek-like crisis if Congress doesn’t allow it to reduce costs and operate with more flexibility. Michael Schuyler, now with the Tax Foundation, examines the analogy between Greece and the USPS in a paper that was released on Monday.

One possible solution offered up for the struggling U.S. Postal Service is to allow it to diversify into nonpostal commercial markets (e.g., insurance, logistics, banking, etc). After all, the share of revenue generated from diversified products at foreign posts has been on the rise and in many cases now accounts for the majority of a post’s revenue.