The Stamp act

Forever Stamps
Photo: USPS

  Next month the price of the "Forever" stamps will increase to forty-nine cents each.  This price will only be for two years and then the price will revert to forth-six cents.  Any takers?
  The reason postage prices increase and people are laid off and post offices have closed is the 5.7 Billion dollar payment each year for health care benefits for "future retirees", the Postal Service has defaulted the last two years.  The Postal Service is the ONLY Federal Agency that is required to make such a payment.  The Postal Service pissed off some people in Congress and this is the result.  Okay, that's speculation.
  When I was born, in 1940, a letter cost three cents to mail.  When I joined the Navy, in 1958, the cost was the same. So in seventeen years there was no price increase.  Of course UPS was in someones imagination and packages were either sent at the post office or Railway Express.  Now the Postal Service only gets a fraction of the package business and our economy is "service based" so the price of a stamp is gone up and up.
  I'll have to tackle the "service based economy" in a Rant, RIP stuff made in the USA.