No more Saturday mail

Although it has a monopoly on mail delivery and mailbox use, USPS continues to lose money and has recently announced plans to stop Saturday delivery.  Some commentators, including WP's Katrina vanden Heuvel, have noted that USPS faces extraordinarily high pension costs because of a law requiring full funding of pension and health care benefits (a law that applies to no other government or corporate entity).  But the ultimate problem is that USPS must break even, despite falling revenues and labor costs that it can't/won't control. 

Cornell professor Rick Geddes wrote a piece for CNN.com that gets to the more fundamental issues facing USPS and some imaginative ways of dealing with them.  He suggests the following steps be taken:

• End the monopolies so that USPS has to face competition, which will make it lower costs and improve service.  All 27 EU members have already done this.  
• Create incentives for USPS to become a global competitor in the mail and package delivery market.  That would mean the ability to enter new lines of business and make strategic alliances.  

USPS has assets, including a nationwide network of post offices (that could sell other things besides stamps), trucks and sorting centers.  Some could be sold to generate funds for investments elsewhere. 

One final thought: it seems like most of the mail I get these days is catalogs and solicitations, that use a lot of paper and fuel as they make their way to my mailbox.  Is it possible that, given the full environmental costs, the postage on these items is too low?  Maybe we could get by on three days of delivery?