The Postal Service Should Be Privatized

Finding true "fat" in the government budget proves harder than it appears at first blush. Many commonly cited sources of "waste" like the National Endowment for the Arts, farm subsidies, and even individual weapons programs are just drops in the federal spending bucket. When one gets to the big spending programs, in fact, finding true waste is genuinely hard. But there's a big, big exception: A truly useless government agency with over a half million employees and $66 billion in annual spending. It has offices in every town -- more, it says, than Starbucks, McDonald's, and Wal-Mart put together -- and it does something that nobody needs. The government agency, of course, is the United States Postal Service. While plenty of reforms seem to be on the table -- the Obama administration has called for the elimination of Saturday mail delivery and many conservatives want to go further -- there's a strong case for simply ending the Postal Service altogether. Rather than tinkering around the edges, Congress and the Obama administration should seriously consider getting rid of the Post Office as it exists altogether by selling its brand and assets to the private sector and repealing its special privileges.