Postal service -- United States -- Second-class matter
_This shows that without going into the miscellaneous
expenditures at all, which would slightly further increase the
cost of newspapers as compared with magazines, the department’s
own figures show that it is losing on the fundamental operations
of hauling and handling 7.75 cents a pound on 426,223,803 pounds
of newspapers, or $33,032,844.73, as against losing 5.4 cents a
pound on 154,719,317 pounds of magazines, or $8,354,843.11._
With a loss, according to its own figures, over 400 per cent as
great on newspapers as on magazines, the department goes to the
magazines, of scarcely one-third the weight of newspapers, and
with not one-twentieth the financial ability to pay such a new
tax, to meet the whole burden of its futile and confiscatory
attempt to reduce the deficit.
Furthermore, the advertising in magazines, which the department
proposes to tax out of existence, is the very national mail-order
advertising that produces the profitable revenue, as against
the local announcements in the newspapers of the class of page
department-store advertisements, etc., which do not call for
answers through the mails under first-class postage (see Exhibit
F).
And, still further, the modern newspaper of large circulation
is more of a magazine, as distinguished from a paper chiefly
devoted to disseminating news and intelligence and discussion of
public affairs, than the modern magazine. Compare the “magazine
sections” of the large newspapers (and most of the balance of
their Sunday issues), with publications like the Review of
Reviews, World’s Work, Current Literature, Literary Digest,
Collier’s Weekly, or even with Everybody’s, the American, the
Cosmopolitan and McClure’s, to see the obvious truth of this
statement.
I have marked the fourth from last paragraph of the publishers’ “Exhibit
C” to be set in italics. I did so for fear the hurried reader might
gather a wrong impression from its wording. The publishers do not mean
to say that it costs the government 7.75 cents a pound to carry and
handle newspapers, nor 5.4 cents a pound to carry and handle magazines.
It is a _known fact_ that both the newspapers and the magazines _can be
carried and handled_ by the government at a profit at $20.00 a ton--at
the cent-a-pound rate. Mr. Hitchcock asserted in the official brochure to
which the publishers are here making reply, I take it, that second-class
mail hauling and handling costs 9.23 cents a pound. In this “Exhibit
C,” the publishers are proving that, _even if his absurd claim as to
cost were true_, his method of apportioning that cost between newspapers
and other periodicals is grossly unfair, as well as ridiculously wrong
mathematically.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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