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Show Who Pays Your Bills? If you go into a store and buy a bag of groceries, a suit of clothes, a household appliance, or anything else, you expect to pay for it yourself. You don't expect other people, who may never patronize the store or buy the same brands of goods, to pay part of the bill for you. The same thing is true when you purchase services. But there are exceptions to this rule - and they are found in commercial enterprises run by the government. These enterprises rarely if ever pay their own way. They commonly operate at a loss which is made up out of general gen-eral government revenues, which simply means that they are subsidized to some degree by all the taxpayers. A long list of examples could be cited. A typical one is parcel post. It is not a basic post office function. It does not advance the cause of public information and enlightenment, enlighten-ment, as do other post office functions. It is purely a commercial com-mercial undertaking. It competes directly with private, taxpaying parcel carriers on a national, regional and local scale. And as the Hoover Commission and other authoritative authori-tative bodies have pointed out it operates at a deficit. This simply means that you pay part of the bills for those who use parcel post service. With the prospect of staggering federal deficits, and increased spending, it's pretty hard to find any sound argument against increasing increas-ing parcel post rates to the point where revenues balance the costs, both direct and indirect. |