I haven't written about it on here before, but I've had pretty harsh things to say about the USPS over the past few years. As someone who frequently extols the virtues of urbanism and is bothered by the outsize subsidies associated with rural life, it irks me that I pay the same to ship a letter as someone who lives 50 miles from the nearest post office. Perhaps more importantly, I'm just not convinced that first class mail delivery is a strictly necessary government service in the year 2013. This was all no big deal as long as they were profitable, but now they're losing billions a year.

The Postal Service is on track to lose about $10 billion this year. And to be fair, a big part of the reason for that is a Congressional mandate, unique to the USPS, that they pay their future retirees' health benefits out to 75 years in the future. They tried to save a few billion dollars a year by cutting Saturday service, but that was quickly squashed by yet another Congressional mandate, this time requiring that they maintain six-days-a-week service.

But in a time of continuing high unemployment, maybe we need to look at this from another perspective. To get that perspective, let's look back a few years. As the job losses caused by the financial crash of 2008 were peaking, we passed a $787 billion stimulus package to save and create as many jobs as possible, and according to the CBO it was somewhat successful: as many as 3.3 million jobs were saved. Taking that number as a given, this means that each job cost at least $238,000. This was spread over three years, and for various reasons its misleading to say each job actually cost that much, but we'll just accept it for now.

By contrast, the USPS employs about 522,000 people (though that number is declining rapidly) who earn an average of about $50,000 a year and get some pretty nice federal benefits. Good middle class jobs, in other words. If the Postal Service loses $10 billion this year and keeps all of their employees, it'll cost taxpayers about $19,000 per job saved. If we got that kind of return on the 2009 stimulus we could have put every unemployed and underemployed person in America back to work, and then some.