The Postal Service Could Economize by Making Full Use of Its Assets

The Washington Post called for further cuts to the Postal Service and implicitly cuts in pay and benefits in an editorial today. There are two points worth noting on its proposed agenda.

First, the Postal Service has already experienced enormous downsizing. It employed more than 900,000 workers in 1999. In the most recent data it employed 587,600, a decline of 35 percent. This downsizing has been associated with substantial gains in productivity, so it is wrong to imply that it has not been c...