20 August, 2010

Everyone is getting the "Morning Report" sent out by our Headquarters folks, aren't they?  Well if not, then you missed this great, recent article.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Where does all the money go?

by John Weeks
Aug. 14, 2010

The Postal Service wants to discontinue Saturday delivery to save money. Congress is considering the plan.
I'm sure it would seem weird to most people, getting no mail on Saturday. Not to me. I lived for years in Loma Linda, where mail always is delivered on Sunday. Never on Saturday.
So I'm used to weird.
The city's large population of Seventh-day Adventists, who worship on Saturday, petitioned for that deal during the Eisenhower administration more than 50 years ago, and it's been that way ever since.
Of course, if Saturday delivery is discontinued everywhere else, I'm guessing Sunday delivery will get the ax in Loma Linda.
The Postal Service also plans to raise the cost of stamps, from 44 to 46 cents apiece. Again, I guess I'm OK with that. They could raise the price to 50 cents, or even a dollar, and it still would seem like a bargain to me.
Look at it this way. If I put a letter in an envelope and asked you to take it to New York for me, or maybe even Alaska, and I offered you a dollar for it, would YOU do it?
I doubt it.
Still, I plainly can see that the Postal Service's double-whammy plan to raise fees while cutting services doesn't seem like much of a good deal for us.
Sadly, it's the kind of deal we're growing to expect, though, wherever we turn.
We seem to be paying more for everything, and getting less.
The Postal Service says that even with the cost cuts, even with the fee hikes, it still might not survive. It still will lose billions of dollars this year. And next year.
That's the part I don't get. I still send as much mail as ever. I still receive as much mail as ever. If anything, my mailbox seems more crammed with stuff than ever before.
Money is being spent. Where is it all going?
I ask the same question about so many things these days.
There are more books being published than ever in the United States (almost 300,000 titles in 2009, a record), and U.S. book sales reached almost $14 billion in 2009, according to R.R. Bowker, a large bibliographic information management company, and yet the book industry is struggling to survive. Bookstores are folding. Libraries are cutting hours.
Where's that money going?
The Sunday newspaper seems as fat as ever, but the newspaper industry is battling to maintain. There is more music than ever, but the record industry is fighting for its life. More people are taking pictures than ever, but camera stores are almost extinct.
Where is all the money going?
The shopping malls are crowded (try finding a good parking spot at Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga), but more and more stores are closing. Restaurants are shutting down left and right, even busy ones.
Where is all the money going?
You hear that people are buying everything on the Internet these days (even steak dinners?), but you also hear that hardly anyone is making money on the Internet.
So where is all the money going?
Is this a naive question? Is there an obvious answer I'm just not seeing?
I don't think so.
I don't see the economists asking any better questions. Or offering much in the way of answers, either.
What's up with those economists anyway? There are legions of them, but we never gain any benefit from their collective wisdom and insight. Obviously, if a single economist came forward with a workable solution, even one bright idea, we all would be ready to listen and take action. That person would be hailed as a hero and showered with instant worldwide fame. But so far, not one of them has been able to come forward.
I've decided that economists are like weather forecasters. They're just guessing, pretty much, and they make a lot of bad calls.
It cracks me up that there's a Nobel Prize for economics. I mean, really, there's not a single economist on the planet who is saying anything that makes any difference. And yet each year the Nobel folks in Sweden decide that indeed there is an economist so brilliant and gifted that he or she deserves a $1.5 million prize.
Wow, talk about no bang for the buck.
Where's all THAT money going?