(Washington, D.C.) - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) Vice President Leslie K. Paige released the following statement ...in response to [yet another U.S. Postal Service rate hike]:

"The Postal Rate Commission's decision today to recommend an average 7.7 percent postal rate increase is a Band-Aid on a gaping financial wound. In the long run, this rate hike will not serve anyone's best interests, least of all the Post Office. This substantial increase comes a little more than a year after the last increase and is, without doubt, only a prelude to the next, inevitable, rate case, which could come as early as October of this year. These rate increases are coming faster and are ever more draconian. We've had 3 hikes in four years and none of them have stemmed the flow of red ink.

"The USPS's numerous, exhaustively documented problems -- from its chronic financial mismanagement, abysmal investments in dead-end commercial ventures, to its heavy-handed exploitation of its monopoly status -- will never be fixed by rate increases. Take Priority Mail, for example. The commission today recommended a 14 percent increase in the price of this postal product in spite of the fact that it is a huge money loser and the postal service has systematically misled its customers into believing that it is any faster than regular first-class mail. An increase of this magnitude for this product is a swindle being perpetrated on American consumers, struggling families, and America's businesses, large and small.

And so the US Postal System and its inept, intransigent, intractable administration drives me to my bookshelf for my copy of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, yearning for Tristero's silent empire all the way. The problem is not simply that postal rates keep rising while postal service becomes increasingly unreliable and slow. My irritation is not generated only by the fact that the USPS seems to delight in setting the price for a single stamp at the most awkward and inconvenient oddball number of cents possible. My blood does not boil merely in resentment for the dismissive evasions of the USPS apologists, who respond to any and all criticism with the trite comment, "You get better service than in the outlying districts of Gorboslavakia, so what are you complaining about?"

No, my outrage is prompted by the combination of these things. In life there are two jobs at which you may be utterly incompetent and expect to remain employed. One is "weather forecaster." The other is "Postal Service Administrator." Of course, if you are blindingly incapable of doing either of these things, you are promoted to counter clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The functionaries of the USPS have the contemptible gall to stare us in our faces and become indignant when we criticize them. They actually become irate when we question their endless rate increases -- particularly when we point out the mismanagement that prompts USPS upper management to grant bonuses that roughly equal financial losses in a given year. As bitter icing on this mice-infested cake, the USPS has recently started collectively muttering about reducing delivery service. Among these is the possibility of eliminating Saturday deliveries, which I have long suspected has already been done by my neighborhood mail carrier. You see, I never get mail on Saturdays. Given the volume of useless crap delivered to me during the rest of the week, I have a hard time believing that every Saturday it is simply cosmic coincidence that I have not a single Tool Crib catalog or low-APR-introductory-rate credit card application waiting for me.

What happens when a company raises its rates while lowering its standards of service? What happens when that company never seems to show a profit? Well, unless it's Amazon.com or the USPS, it goes out of business! I don't know what's keeping Amazon afloat, but in the case of the USPS, we can thank our government for propping up this sagging, drooling monster -- with crutches lovingly crafted from paste, lost or stolen Priority Mail packages, crumpled and undelivered Christmas cards, and our tax dollars.

The trained chimps at Unrepentant Package Smashers (UPS) aren't much better, but at least you can expect to track a UPS package. Have you ever tried to track a piece of US Mail after going to the trouble and expense of sending it with the tracking option? Find me someone who entered that tracking number at the USPS web site and got something other than an error message, and I'll show you someone who's won the Lottery twice, been struck by lightning three times, found a human body part in a sealed can of soda, and who can actually make a Slinky walk down an entire flight of stairs unaided.

If the USPS was truly a private business concern, rather than pseudo-business supported by the taxpaying citizens of this country, it would have failed long ago. It can still fail -- and it should. Let us hasten its demise. Let us use e-mail and private carriers whenever the options are available to us. Let us ignore the petulant and plaintive cries of USPS administrators, who whine periodically to the media about how terribly unfair it is that consumers are using their execrable services with decreasing frequency. Let us refuse to pay for stamps that cost some ever-larger number of cents coinciding with exorbitant prime numbers. Let us respond to USPS retorts with the fact that we expect mail service to suck in Outer Gambia, but that we expect better here at home.

Let us complain.

Let us vote with our wallets.

Let us mute the post horn.