Make Junk Mail Pay For The Post Office

The U.S. Postal Service on Sunday will raise the price of a first-class Forever stamp from 78 cents to 82 cents. The extra four cents come out of the pocket of whoever still writes letters. The direct mail industry will barely notice. It pays a bulk rate the rest of us have never been offered, on the theory that its volume keeps the delivery network alive, when its volume is what the network is dying of. In 2024, it sent the average American household 410 pieces of advertising, compared with 97 pieces of correspondence of any kind.

Rewind to March 17. Postmaster General David Steiner, the executive who runs the Postal Service, told a House Oversight subcommittee that the agency would be out of cash in less than twelve months. He asked Congress to lift a borrowing cap that has not moved since 1992. He told lawmakers that a stamp priced at 90 to 95 cents "would largely solve our controllable loss." Twenty-three days later, the Postal Service filed for four cents. On May 27, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that must approve postal rates, signed off. The new rates take effect on Sunday, July 12.

Steiner's deadline has since moved. In late June, he told a Senate committee that a pause on required retirement payments had pushed the projected cash crisis out to somewhere between 2031 and 2034. The pause buys years. It changes nothing about the arithmetic that produced the emergency, and neither does Sunday's four cents.

The arithmetic is not complicated. Americans send far less physical mail than they once did. Volume peaked at 213 billion pieces in 2006 and stands near 109 billion now, a decline of roughly half. First-Class Mail, the product whose margins carry most of the delivery network, accounted for 44.3 billion of those pieces in 2024. Marketing Mail accounted for 57.5 billion. The mail that pays for the system is outnumbered by the mail nobody asked for.

Yet we all love our local post office. Your postal carrier feels like a family friend, only more reliable, because they show up practically every day. You run into them at the high school football game because they are as integral to your community as you are. That affection is real, and the industry filling your mailbox has been living on it.

In April 1988, a first-class stamp cost 25 cents. On Sunday, it will cost 82. That sounds steep until you adjust for inflation, at which point the increase nearly vanishes: the 1988 stamp is worth roughly 70 cents in today's money, most of the way to Sunday's price. Retail postage has tracked the consumer price index for four decades, and a letter carried from Miami to Anchorage still costs less than a fifth of a five-dollar coffee. The stamp never broke the Postal Service, and raising it again will not repair it.

What broke it is priced elsewhere. A presorted Marketing Mail letter costs the sender about 47 cents. Saturation mail, the kind that blankets every address on a carrier route, runs closer to 26. The stamp you buy at the counter on Sunday will cost 82, and those first two figures come from the mailing industry's own rate cards, drawn from the Postal Service price list. Raise the bulk rate sharply, until an advertiser pays at least what a letter-writer pays and preferably a good deal more, and the retail customer stops underwriting an industry that fills six of every ten pieces an American household handles. Marketing Mail rates rise on Sunday too, from a base low enough that the increase disappears into the sort.

The postbox-to-trash cycle looks the same everywhere. In Bedford, Texas, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, the recycling cart goes to the curb the night before pickup. The next morning, the mailbox is full, and the homeowner stands between the two, glancing at the stack and dropping most of it straight into the bin without opening a single envelope.

The senders never change. A credit card company offers a great deal. A small business wants to buy your home for cash, and a local financial services firm wants to buy you a gourmet dinner to talk to you about retirement planning. Somebody else is selling burial plots, which is not what anyone hopes to find on the walk back from the curb.

When election season arrives, campaign literature fills whatever room is left. Gallup has found that only about a third of Americans can name their own representative in Congress. Ask them to assess a candidate for Place Six on a county court bench, one of the numbered judicial seats that stuff a mailbox every primary, and watch what happens to the envelope.

Companies can send whatever they like, and we can throw it away, and both of those things are already true. What is not true is that the arrangement is free. Every unopened piece was printed, trucked, sorted, and carried up a driveway, and the letter-writer covered the gap between what the sender paid and what the trip cost. Make junk mail genuinely expensive, and the daily walk to the mailbox starts contributing to the Postal Service's survival rather than its costs.

Congress can help. Paper notice requirements written for a pre-digital era still force utilities, insurers, and banks to mail documents most customers would rather receive by email. Congress could relax them, with carve-outs for households that lack internet access. If companies rewarded customers, say five dollars, for switching to electronic billing and passed along what they saved on printing and postage, many reluctant households would sign up.

Fewer pieces printed also mean fewer trees cut and fewer miles driven by Postal Service trucks across a network that lost $9 billion in fiscal 2025, as its costs outran its revenue.

We stopped going to the bank, mostly stopped using ATMs, and no longer stand in line at the cable company to pay a monthly bill. Americans will adapt to a mailbox that holds less, as long as we can still greet the carrier who brings it.

Sunday's four cents will not save the Postal Service. It will only charge the letter-writer a little more for the privilege of subsidizing the mail nobody asked for.