Shipping problems and the bigger picture

Is this country falling apart?

We have problems shipping a lot of items here because companies don't like the extra expense with shipping to Hawai'i.  Try it as an experiment. Order several things off of Amazon.com and type in a Hawai'i address.  I opened an account with a reshipper in Seattle but there is an added charge with doing this.  We needed some parts to repair our van.  If we take it to a garage they try to charge us hundreds of dollars to replace something, which we generally can't afford.  It turned out the easiest and cheapest way to replace a broken handle on the side door was order it online to be shipped to my mother-in-law's house.  Then she brought it in her luggage to give to us when she last came to visit the grand-kids. 

The struts that hold up the rear hatchback door don't work anymore.  I ordered some to send to my brother and have him resend it to us. However, he warned me that the post-office no longer delivers to his house (which is in the middle of a city) so I have to send it to his work address.  What is going on here? I have heard about post offices shutting down around the US but it is getting ridiculous to try to order anything. (One can't help to be reminded of "blighted areas" in Atlas Shrugged and of what happened to Detroit.)

So the USPS is underfunded by congress.  This hurts the economy by making transactions more difficult to carry out--adding to both time and expense of shipping.  This in turn reduces tax revenue which can lead to more funding shortfalls.  This is not a good direction to be headed in.

I know I have talked about this before in this blog but this reminds me of the (global) energy production problem.  This sounds like a simple tautology but energy is cheap to produce because energy is cheap to produce.  It takes energy to produce energy so, the cost of producing energy (in the broad sense, including discovery, infrastructure, production, storage and distribution) is brought down if energy is cheap to produce.  The flip side of this, as energy sources become scarcer and energy production becomes more expensive, creates a feedback effect.  There is not just a linear increase in the cost of energy in response; the cost of energy can rapidly rise at a dramatic rate.

At one time we used the boon of cheap affordable energy to produce additional infrastructure, such as power lines and roads to distribute energy and products.  Now this kind of infrastructure is neglected and allowed to wear down to cut cost corners.  All of these feedback effects start to look pretty scary in terms of the possibility of future economic collapse.  Has this already been happening and we just haven't been aware of it?  We are not living the same way our parents generation lived; e.g., for much of my adult life--including today--a staple supper meal has been beans and rice (my parents had some kind of poultry or red meat at almost every meal). The cost of living today is going up, interest rates are at historical lows, and effective incomes are reduced by 15%--after taxes--by the student loans required to get those incomes.  Were the 1960's and '70's the golden age of modern (or at least US) civilization?