Subject: Town Hall mania via National Review [Rich Lowry]
E-mail:
Liveblogged from WSJ - "Fifth question “from a Republican so I don’t know what I’m doing here.” Question on a universal health care plan, and that if you create a public option, whether it will lead to an entirely government run system. Obama says there’s a difference between a “universal” plan and a “single-payer” plan.
"Obama says the private industry can compete against the government. “They do it all the time,” he says. “If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”
This is classic. 1. the post office has a monopoly on first class mail. there is NO competition. 2. they lose gobs and gobs of money and are only kept around because they have a big union and a government balance sheet (our grandkids) to offset those mega-losses. 3. they are able to compete against Fedex and UPS because they can afford to operate at mega-losses.
" Another e-mail:
" I used to work for UPS in the Competitive Analysis function and we studied the USPS. We spent a great deal of time determining if the USPS used that First Class Mail monopoly in order to improperly subsidize their small package business which competes directly against UPS and FedEx. We constantly had to push back in Congressional and Postal Regulatory Commission testimony to more accurately allocate their costs to show the true nature of their operating costs.
"Point 2 is interesting in that UPS also is highly unionized (FedEx is not unionized). Historically, UPS also has the highest profit margins in the transportation industry and is highly profitable. In the most recent quarter, the USPS lost $2.4 billion from operations (source) while UPS earned $0.9 billion from operations (source)."
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