Whoever decided to lower the price of the stamp, considering the precarious state of the U.S. Postal Office, is a moron.
That being said, I will save the additional 2 pennies and use them to throw at my local mail carrier, whenever I am feeling generous.
These are very minor ancillary fringe benefits from living inside of a deflationary vortex.
According to the US Postal Service, the price of a US-bound first class stamp will decrease 2 cents — to 47 from 49 cents — starting April 1o.
Stamp prices last declined in 1919 when the price of a first class stamp fell to 2 cents from 3 cents.
This expected decrease stems from an act of Congress passed in 2013 that allowed the USPS to add a 4.3% surcharge in order to stem the massive losses for the Service because of the Great Recession.
In a release from the USPS, the group said the act expires when the surcharges had accounted for $4.6 billion in revenue, which will happen April 10.
At that time, stamps will revert back to their inflation-pegged pricing, dropping the price to 47 cents for a first class stamp and sticking the USPS with an additional $2 billion in annual losses.
Postmaster General and CEO Megan Brennan says this will be a disaster for the postal service.
“The exigent surcharge granted to the Postal Service last year only partially alleviated our extreme multi-year revenue declines resulting from the Great Recession, which exceeded $7 billion in 2009 alone,” said Brennan in a release. “Removing the surcharge and reducing our prices is an irrational outcome considering the Postal Service’s precarious financial condition.
The last time the stamp went down in cost, Woodrow Wilson was president.
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Further evidence for the Fed that there’s no inflation. If stamps haven’t increased in price in 97 years, the deflationary vortex is real.
It’s not deflation. It’s politics. Same as it ever was.
As zerosum noted, this is just a bit of political nonsense. Can I get a USPS supported email address? Which I am willing to pay for? More than 20 years after email went mainstream? And Clinton signed the DMCA? No. The USPS should be dissolved in favor of private services that respond to market forces.
This was a bummer, since I was way overweight “forever” stamps.
+1
Cue frog: Get the red out! Central planners must, by mandate, toss all of our tax dollars into flaming barrels of garbage. That somehow helps to re-generate capital losses. Prepare for an alien invasion. It will help fix the economy.