It's easy to write off this as a little thing. But we've written off so many that this country our Fathers' founded is hardly recognizable from a huge corporate monolith. Wake up, people.

"So your answer is, it's a win-win for everybody but the people who go out of business," Cummings retorted.

"Yes, yes," Miller said, adding, "It's not that I'm heartless. It's not that we're heartless. We have to cover all sides. And I think the fairest thing is for every class of mail to cover the cost directly attributable to carrying their mail."

The problem is, Miller's comments muddled the issue, to put it charitably. Since the 1970s, all classes of mail have been required to cover the costs associated with their delivery, what's called attributable cost. But periodicals, as a class, get favorable treatment: They don't pay overhead, meaning that they don't foot the bill for the Postal Service's infrastructure, employees, and so on.

That's a tradition that goes back to the origins of the nation. The founding fathers saw the press as the lifeblood of democracy—only informed voters could compose a true democracy, they believed—and thus created a postal system that gave favorable rates to small periodicals. (George Washington actually supported mailing newspapers for free.) For 200 years, small periodicals and journals of opinion were given special treatment.

The 2007 rate hikes, which went into effect this summer, changed that. Now, periodicals are still expected to cover attributable costs and pay no overhead, but because the cost of delivering mail has gone up, rates within the class have gone up as well. In advance of the rate hike, the Postal Service submitted a proposal to the Postal Regulatory Commission that would have raised the rates in the class more or less evenly. The PRC rejected the proposal in favor of a rate package put forward by Time Warner that, unsurprisingly, hands small periodicals much steeper rate hikes than their large counterparts.

Small periodicals in some instances face a rate hike of up to 50 percent. An increase of that size is almost unbearable for periodicals that publish frequently, like the liberal Nation or the conservative National Review, both weeklies. For them, postal expenses make up a massive portion of their budgets. An increased cost of $500,000 per year, which is The Nation's estimate, would be devastating. (The rate hike is a smaller burden for Mother Jones, due to the fact that the magazine publishes six times a year.