Why Government Makes Us Miserable

Annie Lowery (0:00)

If you are making government impossible, if government is sending the message to a citizen or a resident, we don't care about you. We don't like you. We don't really want you to have this. That those people withdraw civically, they vote less, they think less of the government. And I think it erodes social trust as well. You're basically driving down rates of civic participation and political participation. And I think that there's this strange circularity to it. And this is a big thing for Republicans, they're like, yeah, we don't want the government to work terribly well, so that people demand more of it.

You know, we want to make this painful so that you won't get it.

Jon Favreau (0:44)

I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, journalist Annie Lowery. Annie's out with a fascinating new book called The Time Tax, How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It. At first glance, you might think this is a book about bureaucracy and paperwork and other not very sexy problems that could seem small in comparison to the magnitude of the political crisis in which we find ourselves. To be honest, that was my first reaction when I opened the book. But I am so happy to have been completely wrong. This is a book about why people don't trust government and why they don't trust the party that believes government can and should do more to help people.

What's more, the people who are least likely to trust government are the very people who liberals most want government to help. And that's because their experience with the government usually sucks.

This is a book where Annie chronicles the infuriating, pointless burdens people are forced to bear just to access services and benefits to which they are legally entitled and often pay for.

This includes everything from the paperwork people have to fill out, the lines they're forced to wait in, in the emotional strain they're forced to endure just to see a doctor or feed their kids or renew a driver's license. Annie argues that all this adds up to a time tax that falls most heavily on low-income Americans who understandably respond by turning against government or just tuning out altogether. It's an incredible book and I invited her on to talk about it. She walked me through this Kafka-esque system which traces its roots all the way back to Civil War and Jim Crow and is still with us today in many ways, whether it's the Medicaid cuts with work requirements that Trump just passed, the Doge debacle or even the failed rollout of healthcare.gov. And if Democrats don't figure out how to deal with the time tax, I think the party will never be able to earn back the trust necessary to deliver the change we want and help the people who need it. You'll hear that conversation today and then afterwards we're going to play an excerpt for you from a new show. We are thrilled to launch it Crooked, still counting, a new podcast from the team that brought you 538, Nate Silver, Claire Malone and Galen Druke. The show officially launches on Wednesday, September 9th, but we wanted to give you a taste earlier of what you can expect. So stay tuned for that. All right, here's Annie Lowery.

Annie Lowery, welcome back to Offline.

Annie Lowery (3:14)

Thank you for having me.

Jon Favreau (3:15)

I love the book.

Annie Lowery (3:17)

Thank you.

Jon Favreau (3:17)

I love the book. It brought me back to one of my earliest and most formative political experiences, which was running a volunteer program called the Welfare Solidarity Project when I was in college at Holy Cross. And I had learned about Clinton's welfare reform in an intro poli sci class.

I remember Tyme thought it seemed like politically smart and thought it was good, encouraging, we're encouraging work, we like that. Then I had a sociology professor who was like, hey, before you celebrate welfare reform, there's this project going on, try to go down to the Worcester welfare office. And basically Holy Cross students are volunteering and working with public interest lawyers to help people navigate the bureaucracy of welfare reform. And so I started doing it and then I ended up running the thing. And it was so eye-opening. I mean, your whole book reminded me of it because there were all these people who deserve benefits, were legally entitled to benefits, even with the help of lawyers, couldn't figure out how to navigate the system. I remember like...

Annie Lowery (4:23)

And in a state that likes welfare, right?

Massachusetts is not Mississippi or South Carolina, right? This is very different.