The Time Cost of Bureaucracy

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.
Good morning again, everyone. Now we turn to something our next guest calls The Time Tax. And even if you've never heard it described that way before, odds are you've paid it. It's the hours you spend doing your actual taxes, applying for benefits, writing a medical bill on the phone, filing for unemployment, getting a business license, waiting in line at the DMV. The list goes on. Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and she coined the idea of the time tax in a 2021 article. Now she's got a book called The Time Tax, How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It, where she looks at something many of us have come to accept just like as a fact of life, that trudging through bureaucracy is the price we have to pay to get the services and benefits we're entitled to. Spoiler alert, I'm going to ask her, isn't this just as bad in the private sector?
But Annie, welcome back to WNYC. Always good to have you on.

**Annie Lowrey** (1:11)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:13)
Why did you focus on this for a book?

**Annie Lowrey** (1:16)
I felt like it was almost 20 years ago when I started to notice this when I was out reporting.
Really when I was talking with people, the thing that I was concerned about had to do with federal safety net benefits. I was talking to a group of veterans who were homeless, and they just couldn't access the help that the VA wanted them to access. But then I started seeing it everywhere, and I think you're completely right. Private businesses do this to their customers. The number of hooky notifications and terms and conditions were expected to comply with, to get loans, to go out to college. It's really, really everywhere, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hit certain people harder than others.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:58)
Right, and that's part of the point. Some can shrug it off as an inconvenience. For others, I guess people who disproportionately need government help, and those who disproportionately be poorer people, it's more than that, right?

**Annie Lowrey** (2:11)
Absolutely. So I would say that yes, higher income people might face the same issues, but they have more resources, they have more time, they can hire an accountant to do their taxes. They can decide to just pay that medical bill, even if that doctor that they want to go to is out of network. Whereas lower income people, they don't have the capacity to do that.
Other groups of people that I think are disproportionately affected by this, are people who are not native born to this country, not US citizens, people with a history of involvement with the criminal justice system, women who tend to be lower income, tend to be the people who are getting benefits on behalf of their kids, tend to do a lot of the household management. Also like signing your kids up for after school or summer programs, that kind of thing. And then, yes, low income Americans, absolutely, which is something that we've known, you know, you can go back to Cloward and Piven were writing about this in the 1960s, and I'm sure there's great examples from even earlier than that.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:12)
And listeners, who has a time tax story, 212433 WNYC, what kinds of paperwork, especially from the government, where we're going to get to the private sector? Eat up your time, and how has it changed your opinion of the government? We're going to talk about faith in government and who's maybe for this kind of thing, for political reasons, or your opinion of social services programs that you benefit from. What do you wish the government would do to streamline all of this and lower the time tax? Calls and texts, welcome, 212-433-WNYC. Help us report the story with an experience, or just ask a question of Annie Lowrey, whose new book is The Time Tax, How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It, 212-433-9692.
One of the most interesting things to me from the book is your notion that a lot of people assume these systems are just badly designed or poorly administered, but you argue that at least in some cases, making benefits difficult to access is actually part of the point. It's like with Trump, you hear the critics sometimes say, the cruelty is the point. In this case, the bureaucracy is the point?

**Annie Lowrey** (4:35)
Absolutely. I think we can see this really clearly with businesses actually. So in a lot of cases, it's really easy to sign up for something online. But then there's this subscription that you don't quite notice. And finally, months later, when you realize that you've been paying $15.99 for something, you go to cancel. You know, they say that you have to write a letter or you have to call. You can't just do it online. And I think that that's a pretty clear example of, you know, businesses want to make it really easy for you to spend money and they want to make it as hard as they can for you to stop spending money. Or, you know, I think a lot about the airlines, right? There used to be a rule that if you were involuntarily bumped from a flight, they would have to compensate you.