The hidden tax Americans pay constantly — and how we can avoid it

Shumita Basu (0:00)

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This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, the hidden government systems that steal your time.

Think about the last time you had to deal with a government agency. Maybe it was renewing your driver's license, filing your taxes, or applying for social security benefits. Chances are, it was in some way deeply frustrating. Endless paperwork, a janky online portal, hours spent on hold.

Americans spend billions and billions of hours every year trying to navigate government bureaucracy. And researchers have a name for this hidden and sometimes demoralizing toll, the time tax.

Annie Lowrey (1:33)

The amount of time, effort, emotional work, sometimes money that is put on the consumer, the citizen.

Shumita Basu (1:42)

That's Annie Lowrey. She's 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 argues that all of this red tape is more than just annoying, it has real lasting consequences. So I wanted to talk with Annie about where we feel the time tax most, and her ideas for how to fix it.

Well, let's just start by defining what the time tax is. You break it into three sort of categories, right? Yes.

Annie Lowrey (2:11)

So this schematic comes from two amazing scholars, Don Moynihan and Pamela Hurd. And they're scholars of public administration. And so there's learning costs. What is out there? What do I have to do?

There are the actual costs of getting something, so the paperwork costs, right, of applying or going and standing in line to vote, that kind of thing. There are sometimes redemption costs. This comes from another scholar named Carolyn Barnes. This is the work that you have to do to actually get the benefit once you have it or use the benefit once you have it. So something like that is, you know, for instance, we're here in New York. If you have a housing voucher, you have to find a landlord who will accept it, which is an additional little bit of work and makes the voucher less useful to you.

And then there's psychological costs or health costs that come along with this. How do you feel? And then the American government itself, where you have this federal structure, where the United States is actually made up of more than 90,000 component governments, all of which have their own like little budgets and rules and who knows what. My favorite little factoid of this is, just on the cash welfare program TANF, it goes by like three dozen names in the 50 states, and there's actually more than 100 TANF programs.

Shumita Basu (3:23)

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So who's keeping track of all of these things? Exactly.

Annie Lowrey (3:27)

56 Medicaids. It's structurally hard and then we make it even harder.

Shumita Basu (3:32)

Yeah. And I mean, I like how you listed off already and are recognizing, it's not just the literal cost of time or money. What is the emotional cost or what is the attitudinal cost to us as a society if this is how we feel about our government processes?

Annie Lowrey (3:48)

I think of it exactly as you described in two ways. Personally, how do I feel? Does this make me feel angry or upset? Does this raise my cortisol level?

And then more broadly, how do I feel about democracy, about the government? How am I understood as a citizen? Does this have mass effects? Because I think it absolutely does. And we know that well-designed government programs tend to make people more civic. They vote more often. They go to community meetings. They feel good about democracy. And we know that more burdensome programs, so like the cash welfare program is a classic example of this, make people holding everything else constant. Their income and everything else makes them less likely to vote, less likely to civically engage. They don't feel good about themselves, and they don't like the government.