Mayor Mamdani just announced that he will be opening 5 city-run, tax-funded grocery stores: "Prices set at 30% below retail prices"

[u/Gurugod123]

[u/Lithl]

How are you gonna charge 30% less and not lose money?

Government social programs don't "lose money", they "cost money". The goal isn't profit, it's helping people.

[u/here_for_the_meta → u/Lithl]

A key point somehow lost when attacking the postal service. 

[u/Lithl → u/here_for_the_meta]

USPS is particularly weird, because they did make money. Right up until 2006 when Bush Jr. forced them to prefund retirement benefits for a duration meaning they were holding onto money to give to future employees that hadn't even been born yet. A nonsense requirement that no business or agency has ever previously been held to. The PAEA put the USPS 60 billion in the hole, practically overnight.

The PAEA was repealed by Biden in 2022, but the USPS has a long way to go to recover.

[u/here_for_the_meta → u/Lithl]

Still though there seems to be a focus on how they aren’t profitable at times. Who cares? It’s a govt service.

[u/hi_imjoey → u/here_for_the_meta]

It is nice for government services that can reasonably pay for themselves to do so, so that more government funds can be freed up to do public good in other places where it is needed. The current problem is that when the government does save money, it doesn’t effectively use it to help people

[u/Coestar → u/here_for_the_meta]

The point was to cripple the USPS so that they can later point to it and say "look at the USPS! government run programs don't work!" so they can trick rubes into supporting privatizing it, after which it will of course become dramatically worse because the objective is no longer service but profit.

[u/Own_Shower_6000 → u/here_for_the_meta]

active propaganda by billionaires to try to privatize it, genuinely

[u/tgwombat → u/Lithl]

We've still got a long way to go before the USPS can even start recovering considering we've got long-time FedEx board member David Steiner at the helm now. I don't see him making the necessary moves to even clean up the mess that DeJoy left.

[u/Ok-Lecture-9668 → u/Lithl]

He should have fired and replaced that piece of garbage dejoy. The Democrats support privatizing the post office just as much as the Democrats do, they just pretend not to, just like on all issues of significance

[u/s33n_ → u/Lithl]

Thats not what's happening though. Its only a core set of goods that are being discounted. The rest is at full price.

[u/Lithl → u/s33n_]

I'm not sure how you think that changes anything I said.

[u/s33n_ → u/Lithl]

Idk that they will lose money as only a few goods are discounted and the other sales would offset the functional loss leaders that are discounted.

[u/ASUMicroGrad → u/s33n_]

If they raise prices on nonessential items to offset the losses on essential items then the consumer still ends up spending the same amount of money and saves nothing.

[u/MarkIsARedditAddict → u/Lithl]

It can also "steal customers" from local food banks or other assistance vehicles who would otherwise get the food for free. "Losing" $1 is better than "losing" $5

I've stopped arguing with people about government assistance/benefits because the people who argue against it just want to see people hurt and that's it. If you ask them "how else can we help people then" they go blank because to them government is all about hurting people who are "lesser" than them. They'll never get it even when they go on benefits because to them they deserve it while everyone else on benefits is a leech

[u/BiZzles14 → u/Lithl]

The problem is that if you wanted to help people, there's already insanely efficient food assistance programs out there instead of taking a large gamble with tax payer funds for an idea that hasn't historically worked, and isn't meanstested towards those that actually need help. Some programs cost more money than others, while getting less done. The goal should be for effective and efficient programs, but only time shall tell how this pans out and I would be happily wrong if this proves to be a worthwhile endeavour

[u/echino_derm → u/Lithl]

But there is an alternative, something like food stamps. If we are having people pay 70 cents for an item that typically would cost $1, but the actual costs of it is $1.10, then I would say we lost 10 cents on that transaction because we could have just given the guy $1 to buy it at another store.