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Doing the Math on the Postal Service Hustle
Plus, don’t pass the RESTAURANTS Act
The USPS handles much more mail every day than there are ballots to deliver to voters. (John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx 2020)
First Response
At least two states have now been told that mail-in ballots may not be able to be sent in time for voters to have them counted in the November election. We’ve reported on the Washington state letter, which strongly recommends that the state pay nearly three times as much for first-class postage or risk late delivery. Now another letter has surfaced in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania. They’re pretty much the exact same letter with the same date (July 29), so we can assume that every state has received one. The Pennsylvania letter, though, is the subject of a lawsuit, where activists and elections officials are both asking for emergency changes to state law to extend ballot deadlines, explicitly to avoid disenfranchisement of voters during the pandemic.
It’s worth questioning the entire premise of these letters. The idea is that a ballot sent by states and counties as marketing mail, a lower-class designation, would not arrive on time to voters, amid a surge in postal delivery around the election. First of all, the entire point of the postal service crisis generally, to hear it from the privatizers, is that mail traffic has been slumping as people pay bills online and use electronic communication. Second, we’re not talking about a lot of ballots in the grand scheme of things.
As I mentioned on Tuesday, as of 2018 there were 153 million registered voters in the United States. Not every one of them is going to request a mail-in ballot (in fact a diminishing number of Trump supporters will, though Trump himself did for the Florida primary). Let’s go on the extreme high side and say that 80 million ballots have to be distributed. The U.S. Postal Service distributes 182 million pieces of mail every day. Adding in 80 million over the space of a week or two, and some number less than that returning to election centers, will barely be felt. This isn’t Christmas week, it’s just another slightly busy week in the life of the postal service.
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The same math tells you that this isn’t about postal revenue; adding 35 cents to 80 million ballots does nothing for the USPS’ overall finances. It’s also not about safeguarding voter fraud; even a Trump-appointed judge has given the Trump campaign one day to find evidence of mail-in voter fraud “or admit that it doesn’t exist.” It’s just about voter suppression, as former number 2 at the Postal Service Ronald Stroman indicated this week.
As one postal worker told me, ballots have one of the shortest supply chains of any piece of mail: it goes from the county election office directly to a local mail processing plant and to the carrier. There are no planes, no movement outside of the county level. It’s just never been a difficult problem to get ballots to the public. And it wouldn’t be a problem now, without deliberate sabotage of the mail system.
Ruining essential infrastructure in the process of this scheme is just collateral damage. The Postal Service is a critical part of daily life and commerce in rural America, the places UPS and FedEx won’t go because it’d cost too much. As Americans increasingly get their medications through mail-in pharmacies, the Postal Service has become a critical node of the health care system. Degrading it is not that different from shutting down hospitals.
These assaults hit areas represented by Republicans the hardest, which is why traditionally Republicans would scream the loudest about cutbacks to mail delivery. Because Trump means to steal an election, they have zipped up, while their constituents suffer. It’s probably really bad for their re-elections to have the most consumer-facing manifestation of the government suddenly give bad service. It’s bad for Trump’s too, on the face of it. But when you’re trying to prohibit ballots from reaching people, it’s just collateral damage.
If you do get a ballot by mail, use a drop box or turn it in at the election office, or local polling site.
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Save Our Restaurants But Not Our Waitstaff?
A double-dip recession, which is where we’re headed given the lack of support from Washington, is going to hit smaller business hard. The imbalance between the Fed rescue and smaller businesses is worse than what’s described here, because businesses that are too big for PPP but too small to issue corporate bonds have also been screwed by a Main Street Lending Program (designed to fill in the gaps) that isn’t functioning. One of the biggest sufferers will be non-chain restaurants, which really can’t open in a normal way until there’s a vaccine, and which define communities and make them distinctive. Losing them would be disastrous.
So in that context, the bipartisan RESTAURANTS Act (that is an actual acronym but I’m not dignifying it here) should be a no-brainer. It creates a $120 billion bailout fund for grants to non-chain restaurants, with smaller restaurants getting first crack at them for two weeks after the bill is enacted. Sounds great, right? They even got Morgan Freeman to cut an ad for it. What could go wrong?
Well, there are no worker protections in it whatsoever, for one thing. There’s no requirement to maintain payroll, no hazard pay, no mandate for PPE, and even a provision that holds restaurant businesses harmless if they claim the inability to keep workers on the job. This bailout holds for restaurant owners and not the people who make or serve the food. The two-week set-aside for businesses with under $1.5 million in revenue only suggests “priority” for women- or minority-owned businesses, and after that it’s a cash grab.
I’m told there’s an extremely intense campaign to get members of Congress, particularly progressives, on board for this bill. The Senate Republican bill had a 100 percent expensing option for business meals, so clearly helping restaurants is on the radar. This lobbyist-approved bipartisan bailout for owners, without protections for workers, could see the light of day, if Congress actually gets around to a deal. You could envision it getting stuck into the agreement at the last minute. That would be a mistake.
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Housekeeping Note
Like Congress, I’m heading home for the weekend. And during the two political conventions, Unsanitized will be preempted for Unconventional, coverage of the Democratic and Republican virtual gatherings written by our own Harold Meyerson. So Tuesday through Friday next week and the week after is reserved for that. We are a politics magazine, after all!
Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair
141. Speaking of sabotage.
We Can't Do This Without You
Today I Learned
A startling CDC survey finds that one-quarter of people aged 18-24 considered suicide in the past 30 days. (CDC)
As in 2010, evictions will wreak havoc with elections, because your district and registration is based on where you live. (HuffPost)
There’s no White House plan to end the payroll tax, it was all a bluff. (Bloomberg)
What would Keynes do with the post-COVID economy? Ezra Klein talks to Zach Carter. (Vox)
Newsrooms going virtual in the pandemic, as corporate parents sell the real estate out from under the business. (Axios)
Georgia appears to be the new Florida on coronavirus outbreaks. (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
Online learning leaves behind poor students. (Los Angeles Times)
This link is old but the private planes flying over my house every damn day makes it seem like a WWI dogfight in my neighborhood. (Barron’s)
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