Today, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance submitted the following comment to the Postal Regulatory Commission:

November 1, 2016 

Postal Regulatory Commission
901 New York Ave., NW #200
Washington, DC 20001

Re: Docket R2017-1  

Dear Members of the Commission:

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), representing millions of people from across the country, has previously commented to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) on the dockets for the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) annual compliance report and on the PRC’s preparations for its report to Congress. In these proceedings, TPA discussed USPS’ perilous financial position – specifically as it relates to the potential exposure of this insurmountable debt to American taxpayers – and to the consistent willingness to allow the agency to obscure its fiscal details in such a manner that spoils opportunities to ascertain possible solutions to the ongoing problems.

This new docket to consider USPS’s request for a rate increase on first class letter mail reiterates and amplifies those same concerns. Throughout its financial reporting, USPS has continued to omit exact figures to compare the revenue generated by competitive market products with the costs incurred by such services. With this information absent, regulators cannot develop a full understanding or provide guidance to USPS on whether certain lines of service are contributing positively or should be discontinued.

Among the information that has been made publicly available are fiscal successes of letter mail products. These items collectively produce significant positive contributions for USPS and are often their most profitable. Because of this, it cannot be argued that an increase in the price of stamps is a clear necessity for the sake of overcoming the costs of this service.  Attempts by USPS to add more revenue on letter mail are advanced with the intent to free up additional resources for covering the net losses witnessed for non-critical or other exploratory items.

Financing service offerings in this manner have regrettably left USPS with billions in losses and have left its core functions in state of disrepair. USPS’s charter to deliver mail efficiently and affordably has been left by the wayside in favor of escalating prices while neglecting to address increasingly poor performance.       

Choosing to prevent the permanent extension of the exigent rate hike and maintaining the price of stamps at 47 cents is the right decision for the Commission to make. Thank you for this opportunity to submit comments and for considering this position presented by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

Sincerely,

David Williams
President