How the government wastes our time

**Tonya Mosley** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley.
Think about how much of your life you spend on hold. Filling out the same information on government forms over and over, maybe waiting at the DMV, the pharmacy or the polls, sometimes for hours, even as technology has made nearly everything else faster. My guest, journalist Annie Lowrey, has a name for what all of this waiting means. She calls it the time tax, the hours we lose to paperwork, phone calls, appointments and lines, trying to obtain benefits we qualify for and exercise rights guaranteed to us.
Annie argues in her new book that this isn't simply bureaucratic dysfunction. Sometimes making a system difficult is the point. And the people charged the most are often those with the least amount of time and the fewest resources to spare. Poor people, the sick and the disabled. And right now, this tax is climbing. New paperwork and work requirements have already cut more than 3.5 million Americans from food assistance, and the numbers are still growing.
Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy. Her first book, Give People Money, is about universal basic income. Her new book is The Time Tax, How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It. Annie Lowrey, welcome back to Fresh Air.

**Annie Lowrey** (1:27)
I am so excited to be back.

**Tonya Mosley** (1:29)
And I'm excited to talk with you, and we're going to try to get through this conversation without you or I becoming enraged, because what you lay out here is completely frustrating, and it's more than frustrating. It impacts people's daily lives.
You have spent nearly two decades reporting on economic policy, so you also understand how these systems work. But when did all of this stop looking like an unavoidable fact of life and really started looking like a tax?

**Annie Lowrey** (2:00)
I remember shortly after I had moved to Washington, DC, I was a young reporter meeting a group of homeless veterans. And they were not only unhoused, but they were unsheltered, right?
And I'm not saying that the benefits that we provide to veterans who have obviously sacrificed so much for our country are sufficient. However, they are there. The VA has its own programs. We have an entire government department, a huge government department. And these folks, they just couldn't manage to make it work. They couldn't get to the VA.
They couldn't get the paperwork together. They just had so many stresses and strains in their life. They were so focused on where am I going to sleep? Where's my next meal coming from? That's psychiatric issues in some cases. And I've just thought about that experience so many times because since then, I have met so many people when dealing with the government, when dealing with the DMV, when dealing with the IRS, when dealing with any other alphabet soup agency. And I think that once you start thinking about these administrative burdens, you start to see it everywhere.

**Tonya Mosley** (3:16)
You were actually seriously ill for a significant time during your reporting and writing of this book. You actually were on the show to talk a little bit about it, your condition on the show before. And anyone who has had to navigate doctors and hospitals, insurance, that kind of stuff, they understand what you are talking about, but how much of this book was written from inside of that machine for you personally?

**Annie Lowrey** (3:43)
A tremendous amount of it. So it took me about five years of near constant physical discomfort to get diagnosed. I have a rare degenerative disease that normally doesn't occur in people as young as I was when I was diagnosed with it. So it's only like 50,000 people across the country have it. And dealing with doctors through the process of getting diagnosed, dealing with all of the insurance forms, the short-term disability, the workplace accommodations, at the same time as I had a job, I was working on a book, I had kids, I had life, it was excruciating. And I really think that whether it's dealing with the government or dealing with the insurance system, the health system, which I think is so government regulated and government is such a big player, that we should really kind of see it as all being one big part of the same system.
You know, I felt very lucky to be able to do it. And I know that that luck came in part because I have a supportive partner, I have parents who are healthy, who are willing to help. I had a really flexible employer that wanted me to figure things out. A lot of people don't have that. I was very well resourced.