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" Again, the United States Postal Service needs to be saved. And yesterday&amp;#039;s one-cent hike in first-class mail \u2014 bringing it to a grand total of 46 cents to put something in a box at the end of any driveway or on any street corner anywhere in the country and then have it be brought to any other one of those boxes\u2014ain&amp;#039;t going to cut it. For starters, first-class mail is the part of the Postal Service that&amp;#039;s going down. It&amp;#039;s been that way since the recession. Nobody thinks it&amp;#039;s going to turn around. It&amp;#039;s not the savior of the USPS. You don&amp;#039;t bind your wagon to a dying horse. So if it&amp;#039;s going to work with rates (and there are other options, too), the USPS needs to home in on the part that&amp;#039;s actually growing: the package industry, which was up 9 percent last year in no small part because of all those clothes and everything else everyone is buying online all the time. Or rates could be raised across the board. According to one estimate, a 1.5 percent hike \u2014 a half-cent per letter \u2014 would let the Postal Service break even. But, as we wrote: Congress and [Postmaster General Patrick] Donahoe have refused to consider raising postal rates across the board, which is extremely unpopular with the public and the big mailers&amp;#039; lobby, and which Donahoe believes would simply drive more customers away. We&amp;#039;re skeptical. A half-cent isn&amp;#039;t going to stop us \u2014 or anyone half-decent \u2014 from sending letters to our moms. And 1.5-percent more shipping isn&amp;#039;t going to stop us \u2014 or anyone \u2014 from these bad-boy brogues. So do it, Postal Service. And do it, Congress. Raise the cost of packaging shipping. We can take it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a18476/post-office-postage-stamp-price-increase-15031751/>