This Is Why People Hate the Government

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Ezra Klein** (0:55)
One of the big problems in left politics is that the very people who Democrats and Liberals and Socialists think should be the most excited about big new government programs meant to help them are often the least excited. Or often voting for the party that wants to cut government.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:17)
It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

**Ezra Klein** (1:24)
And one reason for this, a reason I think we don't talk about nearly enough, is that often times their experience with the government is horrible. Their experience with government programs meant to help them is not just inefficient. It's punitive.
It's humiliating. It's controlling. That's because sometimes those programs are built to humiliate, punish and control them. Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She's the author of the new book The Time Tax, which is all about this. She's also my wife. We are married, so we talk about this a lot at home.
Annie Lowrey, welcome back to the show.

**Annie Lowrey** (2:11)
Thank you for having me.

**Ezra Klein** (2:13)
I think people might imagine that I know everything about this book. Yeah. But in fact, when you live with a writer, they will not let you ask anything about their book while they're working on it.

**Annie Lowrey** (2:23)
Oh, gosh, no.
We have very different work habits. I write almost exclusively between 10 PM and 4 AM, which is when you're sleeping and getting up to meditate because you're a normal person. I feel like there's a real ships in the night quality in all of this.

**Ezra Klein** (2:39)
This is a huge opportunity for me. To finally find out what this book is about.

**Annie Lowrey** (2:43)
Yeah. It comes out shortly, so I'm glad that you'll finally be acquainted with it.

**Ezra Klein** (2:47)
I want to start simply. Yeah. What's the Time Tax?

**Annie Lowrey** (2:51)
The Time Tax is the burden of work, whether that's emotional work, logistical work, like learning, knowledge work that goes into any paperwork or bureaucratic process in which you are the end user. It's basically thinking of bureaucracies effect on the people who are being bureaucratized.

**Ezra Klein** (3:19)
You're describing them here as irksome, but you sometimes have another definition of it I've heard you use, which I always find very vivid, where you describe the Time Tax as administrative burdens as a tool of social control. Yes. What do you mean by control there?

**Annie Lowrey** (3:34)
These things seem neutral. There's this understanding, if you're going to get something, there's going to be some paperwork. But these are not infrequently purposeful. They are designed to make people feel good about themselves and their relationship vis-a-vis the government, or feel bad about themselves and their relationship vis-a-vis the government. So they're one of the ways that we construct class.
They're a way that we make sure that people can get something and make sure that some people can't. So the way that I think of them is that they are a regressive filter on progressive policies. It's out there, but it's going to be so hard to get that a lot of people aren't going to get it. And I don't think that we really think about the way that we have this regressive filter on a lot of progressive policies.
They're a way in some ways in terms of just social control, right? We use work requirements to supposedly get people to work. They're not terribly effective at that depending on the program, right? We can use them to encourage people to get an education. We can use it to shape economic decisions, household financial decisions.

**Ezra Klein** (4:41)
See if you're taking drugs.

**Annie Lowrey** (4:42)
Yeah. What can you buy with this?
The SNAP program, you have to get food that you're cooking yourself. You can't get hot food. So you can't, you know...

**Ezra Klein** (4:54)
Can't get a rotisserie chicken at Costco is one of the examples in the book.

**Annie Lowrey** (4:56)
Yeah, you can't get a rotisserie chicken, but you can get food that you microwave at your house, right? That's actually like, that's not just like about nutrition. That's a method of control, right? We don't want you just using this to be easy. We want you cooking your own groceries.