Taxpayers Give an $18B Gift to the Post Office Every Year, New Report Contends

The United States Postal Service’s financial troubles have been well publicized in recent years.

Post office officials have often attributed the losses to the decline in demand for first class mail in favor of more efficient modes of communication, and congressional mandates that the USPS do things like deliver mail on Saturdays and to unprofitable parts of the country.

But as Robert Shapiro—former Treasury undersecretary and chairman of the economic consultancy Sonecon—points out in a new analysis, American taxpayers subsidize the USPS at a rate that surpasses the costs associated with any Congressional mandate.