Mon Jul 5, 11:39 PM ET

The post office isn't obsolete yet, but it will be soon if Congress continues with business as usual. And if Congress can't fix the postal service, it's a grim indicator of its ability to rein in the national debt, curtail runaway entitlement spending, or get the economy back on track.

The U.S. Postal Service wants to raise the price of a stamp by 2 cents to 46 cents--a 4.5 percent increase. But it needs to do a lot more to join the 21st century. Postmaster General John Potter also wants to eliminate Saturday delivery, close low-volume post offices, open new outlets in shopping centers and other places where people normally shop, and broaden the merchandise beyond just shipping supplies. Imagine, for example, a vending machine selling snacks at the venerable post office. Far out.

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Those are reasonable moves for an institution that's about as healthy as General Motors was before it declared bankruptcy. The physical delivery of mail is a "legacy" business in decline, thanks to email, texting, online banking, and the fading need for anything on paper. On its current course, the postal service is expected to lose $7 billion over the next year and $238 billion by 2020. That's a catastrophic deficit, nearly twice what the government has spent so far to prop up two other failed government enterprises, the mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Yet modernizing the postal service is a Gordian challenge that highlights the worst parochialism in American politics. The postal service is a government creation that tries to act like a corporation, yet has to abide by rules that virtually guarantee it will lose money. It's required to deliver mail to every address in America six days a week, even if the daily delivery constitutes nothing more than fliers for furniture sales. It can't lay off workers or close money-losing outlets, no matter how bad its finances. Big changes require Congressional approval, which gives lobbyists for the postal workers' union, publishers, direct-mail advertisers, and even competitors such as UPS and FedEx an inordinate amount of control over the agency.

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The postal service is now facing a crisis that's a microcosm of what's coming in other parts of the government. It simply can't provide the service that Americans have come to expect without a stark increase in prices. So we'll have to make a choice between lower service levels or higher costs. This is the same choice we're going to have to make about Social Security, Medicare, welfare, road construction, education, and even basic services such as fire and police coverage. Americans have gotten used to a high degree of government service financed by borrowed money, a bubble economy, and six decades of prosperity that ended with the Great Recession. The future will be more austere.

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