• Listen to this segment

Ben Franklin thought it would be a good idea if we were able to communicate with each other via the postal service, and so he invented it. He didn’t actually invent it. It had been around Europe for a long time but he invented the American version of it first in the city of Philadelphia long before the American Revolution. The post office has been part of American history literally since the founding of this republic. One of the extraordinary things about the post office is that for roughly 50 cents you can send (and this is roughly the same amount if you deflate the dollars back over time), for basically a fifth of the cost of a burger or one third the cost of a coke you can put a piece of paper in an envelope anywhere in the United States and a couple days later it will appear anywhere else in the United States regardless of how remote that destination is. That is the good side of the post office. The bad side of the post office, from the Republican point of view, is that the two largest employers in the United States are number one, Walmart, which is not unionized, and number two, the postal service, which is unionized with over half a million union workers. And we can’t have that can we? – Thom Hartmann

GUESTS: David Selig, Federal Tax Attorney.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.