The hidden tax Americans pay constantly — and how we can avoid it
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What is the “time tax” and why does it matter to everyday Americans?
Hey there, it's Shemita. The midterm elections are just a few weeks away, and we want to hear from you. What are your big questions about this year's midterms? Is there a campaign promise, a talking point, or a political buzzword that you keep hearing that you want unpacked or fact-checked? We'll bring in a few experts on In Conversation to answer your questions before election day. Just use your iPhone's voice memos app to record yourself. Tell us your Your name, where you're from, and your question. And please try to keep it to around 30 seconds or less. You can send it to us at inconversation at apple.com. Again, that's inconversation at apple.com. And we might include your voice on the show. Thanks. This is In Conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shimita Bassoo. 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.
The amount of time, effort, emotional work, sometimes money that is put on the consumer, the citizen.
That's Annie Lowry. 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. So this schematic comes from two amazing scholars, Don Moynihan and Pamela Heard. 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 cost 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 Oh my god. Oh my gosh.
Yeah. So who's keeping track of all of these things? I believe. Exactly. Fifty-six Medicaids? It's structurally hard and then we make a lot of different things.
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?
I think of it in exactly as you describe 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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the “time tax” and why does it matter to everyday Americans?
0:00–7:15
2
How does Annie Lowrey break down the components of the time tax?
7:15–14:46
3
Which groups bear the greatest burden of the time tax?
14:46–22:55
4
How does the time tax affect civic engagement and trust in government?
22:55–31:13
Speakers
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