Annie Lowrey on America's Time Tax

Some government forms ask a mother to name the exact day her child was conceived. Not because the state needs the date for any calculation, but because a paternity claim requires it. Annie Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic, brings this example up almost in passing, one entry in a long list of ways American bureaucracy asks more of people than it needs to (19:15). Her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It, is an attempt to name a cost that rarely shows up in any budget: the hours, the forms, the waiting rooms, and the small humiliations required just to get what a program already promised.

The term itself is simple. A time tax is what a citizen pays in hours and stress to receive a benefit or file a requirement, on top of whatever money changes hands. Lowrey's clearest illustration is the annual ritual of filing income taxes. In Japan, salaried workers do nothing at all; the government withholds and settles the account without their involvement.

"In Japan, if you earn a salary, you do not have to do anything. You do not have to engage in the tax process at all." — Annie Lowrey [01:23]

Nine in ten American households take the standard deduction, meaning their tax situation is simple enough that a government computer could handle it (01:47). It does not, because the IRS is legally barred from pre-filling anyone's return. The rule is not an accident of incompetence. It is, Lowrey argues, a policy choice with a long history behind it, and one that quietly transfers a public function onto private time.

Not every program wastes time equally, and the contrast is instructive. Social Security's retirement program, Lowrey says, runs on less than one percent overhead and simply works (03:52). TANF, the cash welfare program often called "welfare," costs $16.5 billion a year and, by her account, does not move the child poverty rate at all (02:10). One program is aimed mostly at people with steady work histories. The other serves the very poor. The gap between them is not really about money. It is about who a system is designed to trust.

Who Pays, and Why

The time tax is not spread evenly. Lowrey names the groups who pay the most: people with a criminal justice record, immigrants, and the poor (14:58). The wealthy mostly escape it by paying someone else, an accountant, an assistant, a lawyer, to absorb the hours instead. But there is at least one place where money buys no shortcut. Even very wealthy San Franciscans can wait roughly 500 days for a permit to renovate a house, cycling through rounds of public comment no faster than anyone else (15:50). It is one of the rare cases where the tax is genuinely flat.

Lowrey's harder argument concerns fraud, and it runs against a common instinct. The temptation, especially after a scandal, is to add paperwork so cheaters cannot slip through. She thinks this gets the diagnosis backward. In Medicare and Medicaid, she says, most fraud happens on the provider side, nursing homes, hospital systems, and physician offices billing for care that was never given, not among individual beneficiaries (11:51). A vivid but small case, alleged fraud among Somali immigrants filing autism claims in Minnesota, became a national story that reshaped how people think about a much larger program, even though Tyler Cowen notes that the dollar amount involved was likely modest (10:17). The public reaction to a small, individual-level story did more to damage trust than the far larger provider-side losses ever could.

"I see the addition of paperwork as being a particularly illegitimate way to go about it." — Annie Lowrey [09:54]

Her preferred fix is structural rather than punitive: simplify the eligibility rules, adjust benefit thresholds if that lets in a few more marginal cases, and audit after payment rather than interrogate before it. She points to the 2020 unemployment insurance meltdown as the clearest case study. State systems failed partly because they still ran on COBOL, a decades-old programming language nobody wants to touch, and because no governor with a low unemployment rate has ever had much political incentive to fund an upgrade before a crisis hits (07:43). The fraud that followed, she argues, came from that fragility, not from too little friction for ordinary applicants.

A Tax Nobody Can See in the Aggregate

How big is the time tax, added up across the whole country? Lowrey's best estimate, built from the American Time Use Survey, comes to roughly 50 hours per person per year spent on bureaucratic tasks, a bit under an hour a week on average, with wide variation between people (14:36). She is quick to flag the number's limits: the survey struggles to count time spent multitasking, such as sitting on hold with a government office while cooking dinner, so the true figure is probably higher.

Could software finally shrink that number? Lowrey is cautiously optimistic about artificial intelligence, meaning software systems that can read and respond to complex requests, doing some of the translating between citizen and bureaucracy. She expects AI agents to be able to interpret legalistic government language and answer on a person's behalf within about five years (23:16). But she is careful about the limits. Programs like SNAP, the federal food assistance program, define "household" inconsistently across agencies, which means an applicant may still need to make a judgment call an algorithm cannot make for them (23:56). Interviews, urine screens, and other in-person requirements will resist automation entirely. And she worries about a version of the Jevons paradox, the idea that making a task easier often just generates more of it rather than less.

"Anything that is designed like email to make your life easier will at some point make it worse." — Annie Lowrey [21:37]

Some of the fragmentation, Lowrey thinks, is structural rather than technological. The United States runs 56 different Medicaid programs and more than 100 versions of TANF because of federalism, the division of authority between federal and state governments (34:47). She would rather see mass programs run at the federal level whenever legally possible, on the theory that multiplying bureaucracies multiplies overhead without multiplying benefit.

Lowrey's earlier book, Give People Money, made the case for a universal basic income, a policy of unconditional cash payments to everyone. Newer studies have made her less certain about it. The ancillary benefits she once expected, better health, more entrepreneurship, stronger family stability, have not shown up as strongly as she hoped (38:43). She still thinks the core case for cash holds: money lets people buy the things they need, and that alone may be enough of a reason.

Near the end of the conversation, Lowrey mentions something almost unrelated, the way travel seems to stretch time, making a single day abroad feel twenty times longer than a day at a desk (49:23). It is a small detail, but it sits oddly well against everything that came before. The time tax is what happens when institutions treat an hour of someone's life as worth nothing. Travel, for her, is the opposite experience: time that expands because someone finally has room to notice it. Her book is, in its way, an argument that government should treat time the way a good trip does, as something worth protecting rather than something to be spent carelessly on someone else's behalf.