Word: wenner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...commission's decision reverses a May ruling by its chief administrative law judge, Seymour Wenner. He favored lowering first-class postage to 8½? while sharply raising rates by 122% for second class (newspapers, magazines) and 67.6% for fourth class (parcel post, records, books). Wenner's reasoning: first-class users were assuming more than their share of postal costs, "subsidizing" other classes and turning the Postal Service into a "tax collection agency, collecting money from first-class mailers to distribute to other favored classes...
...Wenner's views appalled many postal officials, including Postmaster General Benjamin F. Bailar. He felt that sharply higher second-and fourth-class rates might actually work to cut Postal Service volume and revenues and thus "ultimately drive first-class rates even higher than anyone has proposed...
...five-member Postal Commission evidently agreed. It repudiated Wenner's method of calculating mail costs and concluded that first-class users were not being penalized. The commission said that the 10? rate, which has been in effect on a temporary basis for the past 18 months, should be made permanent. That move, under the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, allows the Postal Service Board of Governors, the final arbiter, to authorize raising rates by 33% over the current ones within 100 days, again on a "temporary" basis. The governors could hold off or change the commission's recommendations...
...companies. This year, for the first time since the Depression, total mail volume-not just parcel post-is down. Reason: rising rates in a time of economic recession. Postmaster General Bailar, along with nearly everyone else who has studied the problem, warns that the vastly higher rates proposed by Wenner would shrink volume still further. Yet, adds Bailar, "the fixed costs of postal service would remain," and thus rates would have to jump even further...
Magazine executives assume that the largest publishing companies, like Time Inc. and McGraw-Hill, would probably be able to survive postal increases, even on the scale proposed by Wenner. Their circulation, advertising revenue and earnings would all decline sharply, with some inevitable effects on editorial quality. Smaller publications would die by the hundreds, and the founding of new magazines would become more hazardous than it is today...