'Forever' Favored. When I went to the post office recently to mail something that weighed more than one ounce (I don't know what happened to my postal scale), I bought some stamps because I didn't have any 41-cent stamps and didn't want to have to append 2-cent stamps to the 39's still in my wallet. Tho I didn't ask for them, I got a packet of Liberty Bell stamps marked with the notation "FOREVER". Sure enuf, they are the new "forever stamps", which will be good no matter how long they are held, for being honored even past future price increases.
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Altho that sounds great on first hearing, think about it. Who is going to be able to expend a lot of money, and who will have the space to store large quantities of postage stamps? The poor, to whom pennies matter and who don't have computers at home via which to pay bills online? No. The middle class? They can afford to buy such stamps in quantity, but trivial price increases don't matter to them, so most people in the middle class won't bother to stock up on stamps. The cheap-ass rich, however, will love the "forever stamps". Their personal correspondence will forever be cheaper than that of the poor and middle class, and the businesses they own will use them for things like holiday cards for years after first issue. If holiday special issues are also made "forever", they will buy them in quantity too.
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For this ever to be fair, then, to the poor and middle class, the "forever stamps" should be restricted to only one or two designs, forever (there are to be at least two, one the Liberty Bell, the other the flag), so that people who receive mail with them after a price change will be able to appreciate the 'savvy' — or cheapness — of the sender. And holiday stamps must NEVER be issued as "forever" stamps, because mailing Christmas cards is the one time the rich would be more inclined to use stamps rather than postage meters, and they will trust that recipients of two cards a full year apart won't remember what the design of the stamp on last year's card was. So they could get away with being cheap, without being seen as cheap.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,566 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:25 PM