You Can’t Be Partly Pregnant

Mr. Blunt and Cranky was reminded of this old saying while listening to the latest Postal Service brouhaha. For those who have not heard the noise, here is a brief recap: the Posties are broke; indeed, they are as broke as the Ten Commandments. And every time they try something to fix their problem, all Hell breaks loose.

This is because the agency is required to be “partly pregnant”: a constitutionally-mandated government agency that is simultaneously expected to run itself like a private business. That is confusing enough as it is, but wait- there’s more.

The USPS is required by law to serve everyone, anywhere in the U.S., no matter how remote, at the same price, quality and speed. Oh, and Congress can veto many actions of the USPS, and add additional mandates as it sees fit, whenever Congress takes a fancy to.

The USPS tried to cut costs by closing and consolidating under-used post offices. They got smacked down. They tried other ways to save money, and got spanked again. Notice that private concerns like FedEx did similar things to become leaner and meaner, and no one turned a hair.

So we have a government agency, regulated to a ludicrous degree, that is expected to somehow compete with lightly-regulated private-sector businesses like FedEx and UPS. That’s like expecting a duck-billed platypus to outrun a thoroughbred at Churchill Downs.

You can’t be partly pregnant. You can’t be partly private or partly public either. Demanding that the Postal Service be held to two incompatible standards is like baking a Limburger-sour-cream-chocolate-and-onion birthday cake with ketchup icing: you can make it, but no one will be happy with the results.

Mr. B & C

Yes, Government Can Create Jobs. And it Should

Mr. Blunt and Cranky will drive to work today on roads built by government-funded workers. When there, he will use the Internet, developed partly by the government. He will use water fountains that are supplied by government-funded water systems.

He will be protected by government workers from the military and police and fire departments. On and on the list goes. Taxpayer money providing jobs: that is a pretty tangible return on investment (ROI).

Government-created jobs built much of the infrastructure that we use each day: because there is not a lot of money to be made, private businesses rarely take on such projects.

Today, that infrastructure is crumbling, because much of Congress is delusional enough to think that rational business interests will lose their shirts by taking on such undertakings. They will not. No ethical private-sector organization can or should do so.

While the backbone of our economy is quickly breaking down, our legislators refuse to live in the real world; the world outside of their comfy cocoons, in which real people use the real “products” provided by those government jobs that really do exist.

During the Great Depression, our leaders were wise enough to see that paying people to build things was preferable to paying them to look for jobs in the private sector; especially when there were no effing jobs to be found there.

It is time to give the unemployed the opportunity to work again: to not only provide honest value for the taxpayer’s hard-earned (which the so-called “pro-business types should endorse), but also to provide dignity to those who would be working for their money and providing us all with a better life and the increased opportunities that come from those jobs.

The jobs that modern “Republicans” pretend don’t exist.

Mr. B & C