Tuesday 28 April 2009
…the Post Office began in the United States primarily as a distribution arm for American newspapers. In the 1830s, 90 percent of the traffic of the US Post Office was newspapers or magazines. That was its basic job. Within cities, people got their newspapers by post. And the US government heavily subsidized it. The newspapers paid a very small fraction of the actual cost of distributing their wares, such that at one point only two or three percent of the revenues of the Post Office came from newspapers, but it was 90 percent of the traffic. That’s a pretty large subsidy. Robert McChesney ☀
