Unintended Consequences

I believe my impression of LinkedIn is like most; keep topics to business and related professional topics; not political. So I am going to try to thread a needle regarding apparent attempts to diminish the capacity of the U.S. Postal Service. 

The election implications are obvious and, depending upon your politics, are either shrewd or malfeasant. I am going to ignore that debate because thousands of others are amplifying it. I am however going to address that old business nemesis; the law of unintended consequences.  

Degrading USPS service will hurt the economy by slowing U.S. cash flow. 

For those still able to make mortgage payments, millions do so via bank (paper) check and the U.S. Mail. With total mortgage debt now estimated at over $16 trillion, one can speculate the impact of slowing payments on … half of that? What is the daily interest on $8 trillion dollars? At 1% APR, and assuming my math is right (please post corrections) that is .000027397% or approximately $219,176,000 – per day. Even if the actual # of people mailing checks is only 25%, it is still a very big number daily. That is to say nothing of late fees and penalties that will ensue as a result of slowing mail service. “Late” payments, for example, will impact credit scores and bowering capacities negatively; a drag on the economy like the mortgage crisis of 2008.

Now apply the same principle to rent, car loans, credit card payments, taxes, phone bills, cable, tuition, etc. In aggregate, slowing these payments is egregiously inefficient and will cost the economy billions while reducing liquidity. 

Lest someone wishes to point out the obvious, namely the incentive for pushing paperless payments, I get it. But that isn’t reality today. And, it is not just about money. Think about non-monetary implications of mailing legal documents (tickets, titles, wills, trusts, deeds) and personal documentation; medical records, employment benefits, transcripts. Slowing all of that down for millions of people will hurt people, in real terms. By the way, collectively UPS, FedEx and others deliver a fraction of what the USPS does. Even Amazon uses the USPS for significant amounts of their deliveries.

The USPS benefit to society goes beyond delivering our cash, important documents, and employing 600,000+ people. For example, over 330,000 Veterans receive life-sustaining medications via USPS – every day. Now add to that the millions of senior citizens that likewise receive medication by mail, and you can start imagining significant adverse consequences to slowing these deliveries. In some cases, it will be life-ending consequences. 

Maybe in the midst of a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, more people dying from interrupted supply lines of life-sustaining medications isn’t as jarring as it should be. But that is the point to this missive. The unintended consequence of our political rancor is fundamentally changing our national psyche and economic health -- at the risk of stating the obvious. And if your assessment of such actions is limited to the political implications, you may well be ignoring or, worse yet, rationalizing behaviors and actions you would never condone in your own business.

IMHO, there has been an unsettling suspension of reason, logic, and compassion. Win at any cost is the coin of the realm, but the unintended (worse - known but ignored) consequences are damaging the country in ways that will be hard - if not impossible - to reverse. My only hope is to make the business case, to appeal to logic and reason, in order to restore sanity and security to our great nation.

Feel free to add your voice or criticism below. Dialogue, even disagreement, is preferred to quiet contempt and conspiring. I remember a time when we could disagree but still work together. Hopefully, on the other side of this pandemic and election, we can get back to such times. Thanks for giving this a moment of thought.