"The Postal Service's unmatched ability to reach every household and business in America six days a week is a vital part of the nation's infrastructure"
About this Quote
Calling the Postal Service "unmatched" isn’t a neutral compliment; it’s a strategic claim about what counts as real infrastructure in a country that tends to reserve that word for roads, bridges, and photo-op ribbon cuttings. Joe Baca is deliberately dragging the USPS out of the “quaint mail” category and into the “public utility” category, where cuts start looking less like budget trimming and more like dismantling a national artery.
The phrase “reach every household and business” is doing heavy rhetorical labor. It’s a reminder that universal service is not a market outcome; it’s a political choice. Private carriers can be efficient, but they’re efficient partly because they can decline the least profitable routes. USPS is designed to do the opposite: treat remote rural addresses and dense city blocks as equally entitled to connection. Baca’s insistence on “six days a week” reinforces reliability as a civic value, not a luxury feature. It’s a subtle rebuke to the logic that service can be “optimized” by shrinking schedules, closing post offices, and letting geography decide who gets timely access.
The subtext is also about legitimacy: once you frame USPS as infrastructure, you justify public investment, labor protections, and democratic oversight. The line functions as a preemptive counter to privatization arguments and austerity politics, especially in eras when Congress has treated the Postal Service like a self-funding business while still demanding it behave like a universal service. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a definition fight over what a nation owes its people, and how evenly it should be delivered.
The phrase “reach every household and business” is doing heavy rhetorical labor. It’s a reminder that universal service is not a market outcome; it’s a political choice. Private carriers can be efficient, but they’re efficient partly because they can decline the least profitable routes. USPS is designed to do the opposite: treat remote rural addresses and dense city blocks as equally entitled to connection. Baca’s insistence on “six days a week” reinforces reliability as a civic value, not a luxury feature. It’s a subtle rebuke to the logic that service can be “optimized” by shrinking schedules, closing post offices, and letting geography decide who gets timely access.
The subtext is also about legitimacy: once you frame USPS as infrastructure, you justify public investment, labor protections, and democratic oversight. The line functions as a preemptive counter to privatization arguments and austerity politics, especially in eras when Congress has treated the Postal Service like a self-funding business while still demanding it behave like a universal service. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a definition fight over what a nation owes its people, and how evenly it should be delivered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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