Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Democrats' Rhetorical Deficiency

I hear Mitt Romney repeating his claim that to revive the economy "we need government to get out of the way," and he appears to be getting traction with that kind of rhetoric.

An obvious response would be: "Well, government got out of the way of the banking industry, and look what happened," with the more general message that "when government gets out of the way, bad things can happen."  (There plenty of examples that could be brought up as what happens when government is "out of the way", going back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire through the Cuyahoga River catching fire to the recent spate of pet deaths from tainted pet food.)

But do we hear Democrats countering Romney with such a simple and easy response?  No.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The USPS

The USPS is going bankrupt, they tell me.

A time of high unemployment (like now) is not the time to be laying off yet more working people, but looking ahead to a time when we are back to full employment, I have to ask:  why do we need 6 days a week mail delivery? (Particularly for residential mail.)  I check my mail service box twice a week or so - that keeps me sufficiently up to date with the few things that still come in the mail, while matters that need immediate attention come through email or telephone.

I would suggest that when the economy has settled down, we change to twice a week mail delivery for home delivery: say Monday and Wednesday to half the addresses covered by a sorting station, and Tuesday and Thursday delivery for the other half.  Perhaps businesses could have mail three times a week - MWF and TuThS.

By changing and consolidating delivery routes, it should be possible to cut the number of mail carriers down by half, if not more, saving the USPS a bundle on labor costs.

(As I said earlier, I'm not advocating doing this right now.  I'm not in favor of layoffs in a time of already staggeringly high unemployment.)