President Renews Feud With Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Donald Trump opened up a new chapter in his running feud with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Friday, saying the United States Postal Service should be charging the online shopping giant more for shipping, reports The Daily Mail.

Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017

Trump's jab at Amazon's bottom line is a continuation of his longstanding battle with Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

The Post, one of the newspapers Trump most loves to hate, has drawn his ire since early in his presidnetial campaign for generating negative coverage of the Republican.

The USPS has posted losses for 11 straight years, largely on the basis of gigantic legacy pension and health care costs.

And while online shopping has led to growth in its package-delivery business, fewer Americans send letters via first-class mail every year.

Federal regulators moved recently to allow bigger jumps to stamp prices beyond the rate of inflation, which could eventually increase companies' shipping rates.

Amazon, on the other hand, has the markings of an unstoppable juggernaut – and one analysis shows that the Postal Service is giving it a free ride.

An April report from Citigroup found that the fast pace of change in the shipping business has left the USPS struggling to allocate its expenses correctly.

Bureaucrats have fixed the share of infrastructure costs associated with packages at a 5.5 per cent, but package shipments now make up 25 per cent of the USPS's business.

Factoring in the actual expenses associated with delivering more packages than their price model allows for, boxes should cost postal customers $1.46 more than they do, on average – building the equivalent of a government subsidy into the final price.

According to The Washington Post,  Trump has periodically criticized Amazon since before he took office. In 2016, Trump said that the company could face “a huge antitrust problem” if he was elected because “Amazon is controlling so much.” As recently as this summer, Trump twice asked a hedge fund manager whether he thought Amazon was a monopoly. (The manager, whose fund owns Amazon stock, said no, according to CNBC.)

Trump has also charged that the Internet retailer hurts competitors and local governments by failing to pay sales taxes. The company did not collect sales tax for years, but it does now.

Trump has argued that Bezos is using The Washington Post to advance his financial interests.  The Post’s editors and Bezos have declared that he is not involved in any journalistic decisions. The Post is owned by Bezos personally, not by Amazon.

It was not clear what drove Trump’s interest in the shipping relationship between Amazon and the Postal Service on Friday morning. Shipping is in the news with the holiday season, and several cable networks mentioned Amazon and Bezos as part of features Friday morning, though they did not appear to mention the Postal Service issue.