Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

In the face of an annual raid of $22,000,000, what is the use of all this prattle—prattle extending over years—about deficits in the postal service? Will some one kindly rise in the front pews of the postal department or in the sanctum of its beneficiaries and tell us?

There is no deficit in the postoffice service revenues. The people pay and have paid for more service than is rendered—for more service than they have received or do receive.

“But what difference to the people does it make whether they pay for carrying the departmental mail out of the postal revenues or have each department pay for its own mail carriage and handling?” is a common answering interrogative argument (?) to my immediately preceding charge that the various government departments raid the postal revenues to the extent of “many millions,” as Mr. Hitchcock has put it. “The people have to pay for it anyway, do they not?”

Just so, and what difference does it make? Well, here are a few points of difference which might be seen and comprehended without jarring any fairly normal intellect off its pedestal:

1. To have the departments pay or give credit to the Postoffice Department for the service it renders to them is an honest and approved method in any other business. The present method not only violates sound business principles but is dishonest as well—dishonest because it throws the burden of those “many millions” for mail haulage and handling of franked and penalty matter upon the postal rate papers, and not upon all the people of the country as it should.

2. If the free congressional and departmental matter now costs, say $20,000,000 a year for mail haulage and handling, then the government is practicing a policy which both originates and distributes revenue without appropriation. In other words, the general government in such practice usurps the function of originating revenue which function, under the Constitution, is vested in the Lower House of Congress.

Next, the general government distributes that $20,000,000 (or its equivalent in service, which amounts to the same thing), to the several departments, or lets each department raid that service as it pleases. It does this in flat violation of another section or clause of the Federal Constitution which provides that the cost of maintenance and operation, including any contemplated construction and permanent betterments, shall be provided for in an annual appropriation bill.

3. The recommended method would greatly lessen the “abuses” of the postal service by government departments and officials of which Mr. Hitchcock speaks. On the other hand, the method of the present and the past invites such abuses. Abuses grow but do not improve with age. Each year the abuses of which Mr. Hitchcock speaks in his 1910 report have grown until abuses is scarcely a fitting designation for them. These abuses of the postal service have grown, and grown in such a stealthy, porch-climbing way, that they amount to a colossal steal every year.

4. When they hear so much yodling about “deficits” in the Postoffice Department, millions of our people are led to believe that such deficits are created by an excess of cost over receipts in carrying the letters, postal and postcards, the newspapers, magazines and other periodicals, the books and merchandise, which the people themselves entrust to the mails for delivery. They hear that the postal service “should be self-supporting,” that “each division of the service should be self-sustaining” and then they are called on for higher service rates to meet “deficits.”

Why should this great government of ours permit its officials longer to gold-brick the people with such ping-pong talk? Why not tell the people the truth, or at least give them an open, honest opportunity to learn the truth?