We've all been there hours upon hours spent doing our taxes, applying for financial aid, filing

unemployment, voting, the list goes on and on. In her 2021 viral article for The Atlantic,

journalist and author Annie gave this phenomenon an excellent name, the time tax.

And in her brand new book, the time

We have it here.

Here we are. The time tax, how the government wastes our time, Lowrey provides a point

by point guide on how to reclaim those precious minutes. Joining us now for more is

Annie Lowrey. Thank you so much for coming.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Tell us what is the time tax. How do you define that?

Yeah. The time tax is the experience of bureaucracy as experienced by the bureaucratized. So if

we were a business, we'd be thinking about the consumer experience. Very often, I think that

the government does not really consider the citizen experience when it's doing performing service delivery

or just care. And we were talking before we came on. The phrase red tape goes

back to the civil war. Right? That's like the OG phrase because the civil war widows,

in order to get their pension funds, had to do so much paperwork. It was like

it was wrapped in this very distinctive red tape.

Right? Yeah. Absolutely. And so the civil war pensions, right, The United States had a very

small federal government and a very kind of underpowered federal government in terms of everything except

for, like, fighting wars and collecting, revenue at ports. And then during the civil war pension

program, this is kind of the first mass redistributive program in The United States. First mass

program in the federal government, they would collect these enormous pension files, they would wrap them

in red tape. So that's where the phrase came came from. It's actually kind of ribbon.

You said you have a piece of it.

I do. I do. So it turns out that they sell small pieces of it as

a souvenir. So when my book came out, somebody gave one to me, I was a

little I was

like That most apt present for your book.

I know. Exactly. Was like, did you steal this? But no. No. No. They sell small,

small amounts of it.

Is bureaucracy especially bad in The US? You I know you spent some time in Estonia.

I lived in Germany for a long time. There's plenty of bureaucracy there.

Oh, yeah. My German friends. You

know? I what

I would say is that The United States could do a lot better. And I do

think that it is tech forward small countries tend to have the best public service administration.

So, you know, I'm thinking about, like, a Singapore perhaps or, an Estonia. But, no, The

United States is tremendously bad on this, and that's in part because of the federal system

where you have the 50 states and other subnational governments actually doing and because we have

very few programs that are kind of by right. I would if I were gonna add

a third thing, I would say that the way that we do contracting and data sharing

is also particularly bad. But my clearest example of this is if you are a person

earning a salary in Japan, you almost certainly don't have to file your own taxes. The

Japanese tax authority does it for you. In almost all of our high income peer countries,

the equivalent of the IRS there will just send you prefilled tax forms, and you can

correct things. But here in The United States, the average person, it takes them twelve hours

and $300 to do their taxes every single year.

That's like this meme during tax time that I love, that it's like person to IRS,

hey. Will you tell me how much I owe in taxes? IRS, no. And if you

get it wrong, you go to jail, but we definitely know. But we're not telling you.

I mean, it's And the IRS would love to do it. The tax works at the

IRS would be so excited about this. They're legally not allowed to.

But it it does it becomes an access issue, right, for government programs because it becomes

so arduous to figure out how to access them. The programs are almost ineffective for a

lot of people or simply inaccessible.

Absolutely. There's some examples of places where I think high income Americans do get caught by

the same kind of title forces that low income Americans do. But mostly, if you're a

high income family, your benefits are getting delivered through the tax code. And if you're an

accountant, you might not even notice that you're getting a five twenty nine benefit for college

savings or the home mortgage interest deduction. Whereas low income people, they generally have to go

to an office. Sometimes they have to pee in a cup. Sometimes they have to do

forms that are, like, a 100 pages long with a number of invasive questions. And so

I do think that while we all experience this, it's not distributed evenly at all.

How do you fix it? What are some of the solutions that you talk about in

your book?

There are so many problems that are constituents of this, and maybe that that makes it

a nightmare that we're never gonna fix, but I see that as an opportunity. Right? You

could do really simple things like harmonizing the income standards across aid programs because they generally

make you say your income in two different ways, and there's different standards, slightly different standards

for all the programs. Or you can let the IRS do your you know, people's taxes

if they're taking the standard deduction as nine in 10 American families do. And just fixing

the, you know, fixing the way that we are setting up these bureaucratic systems and the

contractors that are selling it to us. We should have learned something from healthcare.gov, and we

kinda didn't. And I wish that, you know, that would be better for all of us,

I think. So there's there's, like, a million answers to your question. Is and so you

can see that as as hopeful or hopeless depending on how you look at it.

Is and just to bring us back down, is any of it deliberate? Like, are these

put up so that it is more difficult for people to access these programs that maybe

folks don't wanna pay out? I know in other countries, in Soviet Russia, for example, this

was like a joke. It was an a tool of diplomacy that they use the massive

bureaucracy to kind of stymie and almost wield against enemies. Is this people who don't really

wanna pay out these programs making it hard for people to access?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Some of this is absolutely intentional. And I think the craziest example of that

in the state of Mississippi, if you've been convicted of a certain type of felony, nonviolent

felony, you can get your voting rights restored if you can convince the legislature to write

and pass a bill just for you with your name with your name, just for you,

an individual bill. So it's possible, but, clearly, they just don't want, people with a felony

record to vote. Right? So, yes, I think that intentionality is absolutely a huge part of

it, and it's why the problem is is particularly bad in The US.

And there are some roots there too in terms of intentionality. Right? I mean, you talk

about the impacts of of bureaucracy on people of color compared to to to white people

and compared to people of privilege. To to talk walk us through that a little bit.

Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, that that Mississippi felon program, that's from Jim Crow. Work requirements,

we invented those in Jim Crow. So I do think that there is a long racial

history. I think this is part of the reason why The United States does not have

any as many by right benefits universal programs as some of our peer countries because we've

always been much, much, much more diverse. And I think that that's obviously had profoundly positive

effects on us as a society, but it's also been difficult for our politics. It's also,

like, when you go

to other places, it's bureaucracies can be big, but they are more consistent. See, the inconsistencies

here, I think, is what a lot of us find pretty frustrating. Mhmm. If you want

a wild ride, a fun ride, but also a

frustrating ride, it's a great book.