Chris Edward for Downsizing the Federal Government: The U.S. Postal Service is losing billions of dollars a year. The government company that delivers “snail mail” is losing out to email and other types of electronic communication. First-class mail volume fell from a peak of 104 billion pieces in 2000 to just 64 billion pieces by 2014.
Congress confers on the 600,000-employee Postal Service a monopoly over first-class and standard mail. The company pays no federal, state or local taxes, pays no vehicle fees or parking tickets, is immune from many regulations imposed on other businesses and can borrow at subsidized rates.
Despite these advantages, the USPS has lost $52 billion since 2007 and will continue losing money without major reforms. The problem is that Congress is preventing USPS from reducing costs as its sales decline. Congress blocks efforts to end Saturday service and close unneeded post office locations.
Another problem is that USPS has a costly union-dominated workforce that impedes innovation. USPS workers earn substantially higher compensation than comparable private-sector workers.
The way to tackle these problems is to privatize the USPS and open postal markets to competition. With the rise of the Internet, the argument that mail is a natural monopoly that needs government protection is weaker than ever.
Other countries facing declining letter volumes have made reforms. Germany and the Netherlands privatized their national postal companies more than a decade ago, and other European countries have followed suit.
Licensed plates
Dave Maass for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a heck of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools — and it won’t cost the agency a dime.
Even though the technology is marketed as budget neutral, that doesn’t mean no one has to pay. Instead, Texas police fund it by gouging people who have outstanding court fines and handing Vigilant all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use.
Automated license plate readers are high-speed camera networks that capture license plate images, convert the plate numbers into machine-readable text, geotag and time-stamp the information and store it all in database systems …
The agency is given no-cost license plate readers as well as free access to the data system Vigilant says contains more than 2.8 billion plate scans and is growing by more than 70 million scans a month …
The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil’s bargain: get arrested or pay the original fine with an extra 25 percent processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant. In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the system pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant’s payment website.
Disparate impact
Nusrat Choudhury for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida: Sam Dubose. Walter Scott. Sandra Bland. Last year showed in terrible and vivid detail how even routine police traffic stops carry the risk of escalating to arrest or the use of force, even lethal force. Traffic stops are not simply innocuous encounters. They can be deadly, particularly for black people.
When evidence suggests that certain communities are targeted for traffic stops because of their race or ethnicity, we need to take heed. The ACLU is releasing a report showing just that. “Racial Disparities in Florida Safety Belt Law Enforcement” is the first report to analyze publicly available seatbelt citation data reported by law enforcement agencies across Florida to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
The report shows that in 2014, law enforcement officers with 147 agencies collectively stopped and cited blacks for seatbelt offenses at a rate nearly double that of whites, despite the fact that black and white people in Florida use seatbelts at closely comparable rates …
The disproportionate stopping and ticketing of any racial or ethnic group for seatbelt enforcement causes real harm. Communities that are targeted by police for low-level offenses, whether intentionally or not, feel unfairly stigmatized as criminals for engaging in common behaviors, such as marijuana possession. Seatbelt tickets carry fines that can burden people with debts they cannot afford to pay. And because even routine traffic stops can tragically escalate, communities that are disproportionately targeted for seatbelt enforcement face a greater risk of harm simply because they are stopped more often.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
