AI Summary
5 min readThis Is Why People Hate the Government
Annie Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic and host Ezra Klein's wife, has spent years reporting on a phenomenon she calls "the time tax"—the burden of paperwork, bureaucracy, and administrative procedure that falls hardest on people who can least afford it. Her new book argues that this isn't just an annoying feature of government; it's often a purposeful tool of social control, and it may help explain why many low-income and working-class Americans have grown distrustful of the very programs meant to help them.
The time tax as a regressive filter
The time tax, as Lowrey defines it, is "the burden of work—whether that's emotional work, logistical work, learning knowledge work—that goes into any paperwork or bureaucratic process in which you are the end user." But she insists these administrative burdens are not neutral. They are "one of the ways that we construct class," a mechanism to ensure some people can access benefits and others cannot. She calls them "a regressive filter on progressive policies."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:41) **What Is the Time Tax?** - Annie Lowrey defines the core concept of her new book
- 2 (06:13) **Marcella’s Story: A Decade of Punitive Paperwork** - A single mom in Utah is kicked off benefits over 120 times after a minor error
- 3 (10:42) **The Ordeal Mechanism Theory** - Why government programs are deliberately made hard to access
- 4 (14:51) **The Devastating Child Support Rule** - One policy that sanctions half of all TANF recipients
- 5 (15:50) **The Postal Service: A Counter-Example of Service Orientation** - How one government agency treats everyone as deserving
- 6 (18:58) **How Humiliating Programs Destroy Civic Engagement** - The political science of why welfare recipients withdraw from public life
- 7 (25:04) **The DHS 1171 Form: A Physical Artifact of Weaponized Bureaucracy** - Lowrey brings out the actual 18,000-word, 1,000-question Michigan aid application
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year.
It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to gain access to, it is often by design. Republicans want paying taxes to be a hellish hassle. Programs for the poor are often designed to humiliate, punish, control or scrutinize. How the government works is always a choice. When it works poorly, we should ask why — and we should demand better.
Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the new book “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.” She is also, I should note, my wife, so this is a book whose ideas I have been living with for years. They have quietly infused more than a few episodes of this show. So it’s a thrill to finally get to explore them directly.
This episode contains strong language.
Mentioned:
The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey
Give People Money by Annie Lowrey
Why Americans Hate Welfare by Martin Gilens
Book Recommendations:
My Silent War by Kim Philby
To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].
You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engin
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