This Is Why People Hate the Government

The Ezra Klein Show

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show explores why many people who could benefit most from government programs are often the least enthusiasti

Key takeaways

• Bureaucratic systems often serve as tools of social control rather than mere administrative efficiency.
• The 'time tax' refers to the emotional, logistical, and financial burden imposed on individuals navigating government programs.

Main topics

• The time tax in public welfare systems
• Bureaucracy as a tool of social control

Notable quotes

"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."

Conclusion

The episode underscores that government programs meant to help the poor often fail because

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I'm David Marchese. And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. And we're the hosts of The Interview from Speaker 4 (0:05) The New York Times. David Speaker 2 (0:06) and I have spent our careers interviewing some of the most interesting and influential people in the world. Which Speaker 4 (0:12) means we know when Speaker 2 (0:13) to ask tough questions Speaker 4 (0:14) and when to just sit back and listen. And Speaker 2 (0:16) now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week. We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world. Speaker 4 (0:22) And we'll get some great stories from them, too. Speaker 2 (0:24) It's The Interview from The New York Times. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (0:56) 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. Speaker 5 (1:15) Or often voting for the party that wants to cut government. Speaker 6 (1:18) It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. Speaker 5 (1:24) And one reason for this, a reason I think we don't talk about nearly enough, is that oftentimes 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 Speaker 6 (1:49) humiliate, punish, and control them. Speaker 5 (1:53) Annie Lowry 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. She joins me now. Speaker 5 (2:09) Annie Lowry, welcome back to the show. Speaker 1 (2:11) Thank you for having me. Speaker 5 (2:14) So I think people might imagine that I know everything about this book. Speaker 1 (2:18) Yeah. Speaker 5 (2:19) But in fact, like when you live with a writer, they will not let you ask anything about their book while they're working on it. Oh, Speaker 1 (2:24) gosh, no. And it's also. We have very different work habits. So I write almost exclusively between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., which is when you are sleeping and getting up to meditate because you're a normal person. So I feel like there's a real ships-in-the-night quality to all of this. Yeah, Speaker 5 (2:40) so Speaker 1 (2:40) this Speaker 5 (2:40) is a huge opportunity for me. So to finally find out what this book is about. Speaker 1 (2:44) Yeah, no, it comes out shortly. So I'm glad that you'll finally be acquainted with it. Speaker 5 (2:48) So I want to start simply. Yeah. What's a time tax? Speaker 1 (2:52) The time tax is the burden. of work, whether that's emotional work, logistical work, you know, like learning knowledge work that goes into any paperwork or bureaucratic process in which you are the end user. So it's basically thinking of bureaucracy's effect on the people who are being bureaucratized. Speaker 5 (3:19) You're sort of 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 text as administrative burdens as a tool of social control. Speaker 1 (3:32) Yes. What Speaker 5 (3:33) do you mean by control there? Speaker 1 (3:35) These things seem neutral. There's this understanding, right, 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. Speaker 1 (4:02) 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. Speaker 1 (4:25) They're away 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. See Speaker 5 (4:42) if you're taking drugs. Speaker 1 (4:43) Yeah. What can you 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, can't Speaker 5 (4:55) get a rotisserie chicken at Costco, but Speaker 1 (4:56) you can get like food that you microwave at your house. Right. That's actually like that's not just like about nutrition. That's 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. And there's funnily enough, in a lot of states, there's exemptions for people who are unstably housed or homeless because it's really hard to cook for yourself. if you're not living anywhere. Snap cards are good, right? EBT cards now, they work just right. It's like your visa. But it used to be that, you know, still and in some cases still, right, like you have to separate out the grocery orders. It makes you very visible to other people in the grocery store that you're using it. And I think that that is like a social outcome to a Speaker 5 (5:44) tool of humiliation. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:45) They want to humiliate you. Or they are willing to humiliate you so that you can feed your kid. And so that's what I mean when I say that these are social tools. Right. And they come with this kind of time valence. They come with this financial valence. And then they come with an emotional valence, too. Speaker 5 (6:01) You have a good line in the book where you say poverty is a social construct, not just a material state of being. And the time tax is part of its construction with forms, summonses and sanctions. The government impresses upon poor people that it is their fault they are poor. It applies skepticism to the needy, the overwhelmed, and the unlucky, that it does not apply to the powerful and wealthy. It does that, but it also adds, and you say it this way in other places, like a part-time job. Yeah. Right? You're already behind. You're already struggling with the basics of life. And now you have to do all of this. You've been reporting with someone in Utah. It's like, I feel like it's Speaker 1 (6:38) a Speaker 5 (6:38) very good example of this. Do you want to talk through that? Speaker 1 (6:41) Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:43) Um, Marcella is a single mom of three kids and she's a manicurist. And so she is low income. And there's so much that I admire about her. Um, she has just been handed a lot. And she has worked so hard to make her life better and her kids life better. When I met her, she was going to school, like, esthetician school, so that she could perform different services, higher-value services. When I saw her a couple weeks ago, she has this idea for kind of like a nail tech thing. She'd gone to the University of Utah to ask about, like, what is a copyright and a trademark? Can they help her patent it? She'd found an American producer, like a made-in-the-USA producer. And she had been helped by an amazing nonprofit based in Salt Lake City called Circles, which is self-empowerment, right? People come to these meetings, they get advice, but they're really focusing on getting their income up and, you know, having help and accountability towards a plan. And it is this enormously, enormously great resource that's very different than the experience that people often get when they're walking into a benefit office there. Speaker 1 (8:03) And she uses public assistance, Medicaid, other programs, SNAP. And she was labeled as a fraud risk nine years ago. Speaker 1 (8:17) And she sort of describes this as a paperwork error. She didn't mean to do it, but she can't like afford a tax person. And she didn't know how to, you know, talk to the state about like, hey, the nail salon I was working kind of screwed me over on this. What? And she paid some restitution to the state. The dollar amount is really low. And ever since then, she has to reapply for her benefits every month or two. years later. And these benefits are meant to help her kids. She has never had any issues since then. And the state of Utah has kicked her off of one benefit or another more than 120 times. 120 times. And she doesn't have a lot of choice, right? She's got kids to feed in a very literal sense. And it's like, what is the point here? But it's still Speaker 5 (9:10) just a lot of time. I mean, you have this scene where she's being helped by, I think, at least in part, social workers, and they're just befuddled in front of their computer. Speaker 1 (9:17) Yeah, it takes hours and hours and hours. And she Speaker 5 (9:20) doesn't have a computer, right? She Speaker 1 (9:21) doesn't have a, she just got one. But she didn't she didn't have a laptop. She didn't have Wi-Fi. Right. She's, you know, went on on on at some point with me about how hard it was to get a photo on her cell phone and send it as a fax because she needed to do that. And she's like, how do I do this thing? And I'm like, why do you got to why do you have to send anything as a fax? But you do. And the amount of time, the amount of stress. And it's why I think that she's such an amazing person that she has managed to figure things out in spite of this. So, yes, she gets the help, but it comes with this tremendous cost. Speaker 5 (10:00) And it's time she can't spend. Yeah, with her Speaker 1 (10:02) kids. Speaker 5 (10:02) Working her way out of poverty, being a mother. Doing Speaker 1 (10:05) anything. Working Speaker 5 (10:06) on her nail business. Speaker 1 (10:07) Yeah, exactly. And Speaker 5 (10:08) I just always think this is such an underrated. There's all you talk about some of it in the book. and this has been like an obsession at times in our household, there's a huge cognitive cost to poverty. Speaker 1 (10:19) Yeah. That Speaker 5 (10:20) being poor is like being sleepless. Speaker 1 (10:22) Yes. Speaker 5 (10:23) Like we've, people have like done this, they have looked at it, they have done all kinds of experiments. It's Speaker 1 (10:28) equivalent to pulling an all-nighter. Speaker 5 (10:30) And it's just constant, like thinking about things and mental weight, and it just makes it harder to pull out. That if the point of the state was to make it easier to not be poor, that... These states that believe the way you're going to do that is wrapping people in procedure and humiliation. It's exactly the opposite. Speaker 1 (10:49) Oh, the Speaker 5 (10:50) like, well, you need to make it easier for people to move forward in their life, not harder. Yes. Like if you're poor, it's fucking hard enough. Right. Speaker 1 (11:00) And there's this idea that ordeal mechanism theory. So this is this like very, you know, probably nobody has ever heard of this comes out in the 1980s that basically in government programs. You want to make them a bit of an ordeal. And what that is going to do is that is going to get people who don't really need the benefit not to get it. Right. It's going to discourage them. And it's also going to help you protect against fraud. It's going to, you know, increase the public's confidence in a given program. And I think layered onto that is this idea, this almost puritanical notion. If you're getting something, you've got to work for it. It shouldn't just come to you. And so if you're not working or not working enough in the labor market, you should you should have to work for these things. You shouldn't just get them. And in fact, you needed to have all of these little structures and these rules in order to build the kind of mass public's trust. But this didn't always totally make sense to me because it's not like people liked welfare better after 96. It's not like a more popular. Nobody's like, oh, that's a really great program today. So I don't think that adding administrative burdens to it improved it. Speaker 5 (12:12) But so then what happens in 96? Today Speaker 3 (12:14) we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began. Speaker 1 (12:22) In 96, the program is required to have work requirements. It's required to have sanctions for noncompliant users of the program. There's a time limit. You can only get it for five years, no matter how many kids you have. Right. If you have one kid and then you have a kid 10 years later, like you're not going to get TANF. Right. It stops being an entitlement. So if you meet the criteria, you don't necessarily get the benefit. It gets block granted to the state. And they've never changed the block grant amount, even adjusting for inflation. It's still 16.5 trillion dollars per year. So tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. Speaker 3 (13:01) From now on, our nation's answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare. It will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work. Today, we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life. For Speaker 1 (13:21) the people who are receiving the money, they have to do so much work to get this really paltry benefit. And the benefit is so hard for them to get. And the application is not just difficult to do, but the application is humiliating, embarrassing. Something that nobody actually wants to do often because the benefit is so small. So one example of this is that let's say that you were a teenage parent and you weren't married to the father of your children. State requires you to identify the father of your child to the state so that they can go after the dad for child support. And you might think, OK, that's like reasonable, right? Like maybe that helps the non-custodial parent become more involved in the life of their kid. But if you actually talk to mothers who are complying with this, they say things like, I actually have a pretty good relationship with that guy, but he's really poor. And like, what if he becomes homeless because he's been garnished for child support? Or they might say, I was in an abusive relationship and I don't want to identify the father of my child to somebody I don't trust. Right. to some state admit what I'm going to tell them about one of the hardest things that happened in my entire life. And so noncompliance with the child support rules, which again, I think they have a fine theory behind them, leads to in some cases, like half of the people who get sanctioned by the program, which is this sort of punitive, you're not complying with the rules, we're going to claw your benefits back, depending on the state, are sanctioned for that one policy alone. And TANF now is so ineffective that it does not actually change the child poverty rate. It has no effect on it. This is like one of my favorite, right? The program that we have that has this supposed goal has gotten so jumbled up and the money goes to so many different things. And the states administer this program often with such cruelty. That it doesn't actually do anything. Speaker 5 (15:35) So I think this gets at the big distinction operating across a lot of these programs, which is the programs where we intuitively or by default think people are deserving. Yes. And the programs where we treat them intuitively or by default, the government does, with suspicion. They have to prove themselves worthy. Speaker 5 (16:00) I think it's useful to sort of jump back and forth a little bit between them. The Postal Service is kind of an amazing example here of a program, a government operation. Speaker 5 (16:16) They just decided everybody is worthy of getting their mail delivered no matter where they live. You talk about a art project, I guess, by Stephen Brower Speaker 3 (16:27) at Speaker 5 (16:28) New York's School of Visual Arts. Can you just talk about that and talk about the post office as a kind of counter example here? Speaker 1 (16:36) Yeah, absolutely. So he has these students, art students, I think, and he asked them to send him a letter. So these students, they draw maps, they make pictures, like they write things in kind of unusual typefaces and fashions, right? And they're art students. And basically all of the mail gets to him because the postal workers like figure it out. They look at the map and they're like, OK, like we'll take it. You know, it has a stamp on it. We're Speaker 3 (17:04) going Speaker 1 (17:04) to try. Or they're like shading and occluding and trying to figure the addresses out. And I think that the Postal Service has this service orientation. It is in so many ways like the most amazing service, I think, in American life. They operate everywhere. You don't have to register your address. They deliver mail by skiff in some cases, like I think like those boats that you do this. They deliver mail by mule to the base of the Grand Canyon. Speaker 5 (17:34) Who lives at the base of the Grand Canyon and has a... There's Speaker 1 (17:37) a hotel there. And there's Speaker 5 (17:39) a Speaker 1 (17:39) Native American reservation, I believe, is there. There's people down there. They make a good faith effort to get mail to everyone. But Speaker 5 (17:46) this gets to the question of deserving and deserving. We have decided you're deserving of getting your mail delivered. Everybody Speaker 1 (17:54) is. Speaker 6 (17:54) Even if you Speaker 1 (17:54) live Speaker 6 (17:54) somewhere tricky. Speaker 1 (17:55) There's not a question. Speaker 5 (17:56) Medicare. You turn 65. Speaker 1 (17:59) That's it. It Speaker 5 (18:00) happens pretty easily. And we were talking about this in the team as we were preparing for this. And one of the questions somebody was saying is like, well, that's easy because it's just when people are getting to retirement age. But no, these social security in the sense that you get different amounts depending on what your income has been, what you've paid in. Medicare has multiple programs within it. So why are they easy? Is it like a lack of administrative complexity in figuring out who it is or is it something else? Speaker 1 (18:27) Seniors vote. Seniors are enormously politically powerful as a constituency in the United States. This is a contributory benefit. And there's this idea that the government is kind of saving your money and giving it back to you. That, I think, is. A pleasant fiction. That's not how it works. Speaker 2 (18:47) Yes. Speaker 1 (18:48) Regardless, there's this idea that, yeah, if you don't earn Social Security, you're not going to get Social Security. And I would you know, there's tremendous amounts of beautiful political science research that shows that participating in Social Security makes you civic, makes you feel like an American. And then you'll come out as a constituency to defend it. And a lot of other programs don't have that. Many other programs don't have that. You Speaker 5 (19:18) talk a bit about the research on this, of what happens when you interface or depend on programs that humiliate you, that make you jump through a lot of hoops. What does happen? Speaker 1 (19:27) The work that I like on this, one of the great pieces of work on this, and there's a lot in political science and there is a lot in sociology, is this work by... Joe Sauce, and he looks at moms who are on cash welfare and compares them to moms that are similarly situated in income terms but aren't getting the program. And he finds that welfare makes people withdraw, right? It makes them less civic, less likely to vote. They develop this adversarial relationship with the state because they see the state as being Speaker 1 (20:09) a source of aid and help, but