SAVE THE POST OFFICE

It's funny how we don't care about things much until they "hit home". Such was the case recently when I heard that the Post Office is planning to shut down some local branches to save money. I thought it was probably a good idea until, as I listened to the locations of ones to get the hatchet in my local area, I suddenly heard the one mentioned where I have MY box.

One of the reasons cited as to why the Post Office has been losing so much money is the increased use of electronic communications. I know personally that e-mails are cheaper to send than letters, especially if I send a lot of them. For instance, if I send out 50 e-mails in a month and pay $10 for an internet connection, that's only 20 cents per mailing, which is less than half the first class postage rate.

Many of us send out many times more than 50 per month, especially if we start to count text messages on our cell phones, or tweets on Twitter, or short postings on Facebook, etc.

How about if we all pitch in to help the Post Office survive. After all, it's nice to know that we can still send real letters, birthday cards, and documents when needed, right? Here's what we can do:

Get our Congress to levy a 1 cent tax on each text message and the like, and a 2 cents tax on each e-mail. The tax would be for each one that is sent from within the USA and would apply to each recipient in the "To" list. So, if I sent out a bulk e-mail to 100 of my friends, I would be charged $2. Compare that to my sending out 100 letters in the mail; that would cost me $440 in just postage, not to mention the paper, envelopes, printing, etc.

The tax would go directly to subsidize the Post Office. Cell phone carriers and internet e-mail providers could take out 2% for their effort in collecting and submitting this tax to the government.

So, how about it, folks. We CAN afford it. Let's contact our Congressional representatives and ask them to pass this tax in order to save our Post Office!