The news is so full of how much more everything costs. Under a new administration (either party) it is pretty certain that we will be set upon with new taxes. Food costs more, gasoline costs a lot more than it did a year ago — the sky is falling down on us.

Wouldn’t it be nice if maybe, just maybe, the government could save some money and pass the savings on to us, the poor overburdened taxpayer?

I have an answer! It’s so much in front of us I can’t believe it. It’s like walking into a room and “seeing” the 3,000 lb. gorilla.

Have you ever walked into a United States post office on a Saturday, looking for counter service? If you have, in a vast majority of post offices, you discover that there is no counter service on Saturday. The postal service is smart enough to close on Saturday and therefore save a ton of money. So why do they deliver mail on Saturday?

It is difficult for the common man to figure out how many folks work five days a week and how many work six days a week for the post office. Those in charge seem to make it so complicated that even common mortals who work for the post office have a difficult time explaining who works and when.

One thing that seems clear is the fact that if we didn’t have Saturday delivery, some six-day-a-week people would be working five days a week and the extra folks wouldn’t be needed to fill in. If we didn’t have Saturday home delivery, the payroll savings would only be a small part of the total savings. Think of the huge savings in energy! One sixth of the total that the post office pays for energy to fuel our mail trucks would be saved. The savings would run into the millions and millions of savings of taxpayers dollars. Maybe with the savings the postal service wouldn’t have to raise the price of postal stamps so often.

Who might suffer if there were no Saturday home delivery? The one group that I can think of are the folks who might receive a Social Security check on a Saturday. Perhaps Social Security could isolate all the people whose checks are not directly deposited into checking accounts and mail those checks the first of the week.

None of us like change, but I really think that we could digest this because the savings would be huge.

Now how do we get this before the right people in Washington? This is why we elect people like Rep. Mike Thompson. Rep. Thompson would know exactly what committees to send this concept to. He could even call it “the Mike Thompson bill,” and he could take all the credit for an idea that could save big-time dollars. Who knows — they might even come up with a postal stamp with his picture on it as a way to say thank you.

Actually, the idea is so good that the folks in D.C. won’t know what to do with it.

P. S. this letter was hand-delivered, not mailed.

(Jay Jacobs lives in Napa)