“If the post office was a private company, it would have been bankrupt a long time ago.” This sentiment, echoing Elon Musk’s view, highlights the financial struggles of the United States Postal Service.
In a recent discussion on Newsmax’s “Carl Higbie FRONTLINE,” Carl Higbie and former Trump attorney Christina Bobb explored potential solutions, focusing on whether private sector strategies could rescue the USPS and Amtrak from their ongoing deficits. Could privatization be the answer, or are there other ways to address the systemic inefficiencies plaguing these institutions?
Video summary generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
The Postal Service’s Financial Crisis
The Postal Service has faced financial losses since 2007. These losses are not small. In 2022, the net loss was $950 million. In 2023, it ballooned to $6.5 billion. Even more surprising, they hired 80,000 people last year, with losses totaling $9.5 billion. How can an organization lose more money as it hires more people?
Christina Bobb pointed out that the Postal Service operates on a “1970s at best model.” Today, people communicate in different ways. The volume of mail has decreased. So, is the USPS adapting to the modern era? How many of us lose our stamps before we even get a chance to use them?
Can you trust the Post Office? Carl Higbie jokingly challenged listeners to mail $10,000 to themselves. Would it arrive? This raises questions about the reliability of mail delivery, especially when it comes to important items like ballots.
Privatization: A Possible Solution?
Elon Musk has suggested privatizing the Postal Service. Christina Bobb agrees with Musk. She believes that 80% of Americans feel the same way. But is privatization even possible?
Christina Bobb explained that there are constitutional issues that could prevent complete privatization. However, some services could be parsed out to private companies like FedEx and UPS. These companies already handle mail. So, there are ways to make changes without fully privatizing the USPS.
The private sector has incentives that could be applied to government positions. This could improve efficiency. For example, the $9.5 billion loss from the Postal Service could be examined. Where is that money going?
Amazon’s Role in USPS Losses
A closer look at USPS contracts is needed. How much taxpayer money goes to Amazon deliveries? Are taxpayers subsidizing Amazon shareholders? Implementing private sector changes could benefit these government programs.
Amtrak’s Financial Troubles
Amtrak is also struggling. Last year, Amtrak lost $705 million. Can any private company sustain those losses year after year? On Amtrak trips, one might see an employee microwaving a hot dog. That employee receives union benefits and a $70,000 salary. Are there ways to cut back on spending?
Amtrak needs to reassess its contracts, maintenance costs, and hiring practices. Are taxpayers getting what they pay for? The answer may be no.
Corporate America’s DEI Shift
Big corporations are seemingly following the Federal government’s lead. Disney laid off DEI employees. ABC shut down its polling group, 538. BlackRock ended its DEI programs. JP Morgan Chase’s CEO wants employees back in the office.
These changes happened soon after Trump won. Were corporations prepared for a Trump win? Did they have an alternative plan? Rewriting HR policies takes months. It appears that the American public pushed back against DEI initiatives. Companies are now catering to their customers. They are acknowledging the need to cater to those who pay their bills.
Hunter Biden’s Lawsuit
Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit. He now wants it dismissed because of his financial troubles. The lawsuit was against a former White House aide over the laptop. Some say the lawsuit was designed to cause pain. It didn’t work. Now, they are stuck. Should they go all the way? Should he pay?
Conclusion
The Postal Service and Amtrak face significant financial challenges. Privatization and private sector solutions may offer a path forward. Scrutinizing contracts, reassessing business models, and incentivizing efficiency could lead to improvements. What are your thoughts on privatizing the Postal Service? Share your opinions in the comments below.
Thank you to Christina Bobb for her valuable insights.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
