Commentary: The truth about the Postal Service

By Fredric Rolando

Few institutions touch more Americans than the U.S. Postal Service, which six days a week delivers mail to 150 million homes and businesses in big cities and remote areas. And we do more than link the country; we become part of local communities, getting to know our customers and occasionally saving elderly residents who are ill, finding missing children, putting out fires and more. In our spare time, we conduct the nation's largest single-day food drive, replenishing food pantries in your community in tough economic times.

That degree of familiarity and personal interaction is why the amount of misinformation floating around about the Postal Service is so counter-intuitive. There's plenty of room for differing ideas about public policy, but we should all start from a factual basis - something too many columnists and commentators with an ideological ax to grind fail to do.