This Is Why People Hate the Government

In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year. It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to gain access to, it is often by design. Republicans want paying taxes to be a hellish hassle. Programs for the poor are often designed to humiliate, punish, control or scrutinize. How the government works is always a choice. When it works poorly, we should ask why — and we should demand better. Annie Lowrey is 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 is also, I should note, my wife, so this is a book whose ideas I have been living with for years. They have quietly infused more than a few episodes of this show. So it’s a thrill to finally get to explore them directly.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:25Ezra Klein?

  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. Kill, mob, kill. Kill, mob, kill. Kill, mob, kill. Are often voting for the party that wants to cut government.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

• 0:53Ezra Klein?

  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 humiliate, punish, and control them. 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.

• 1:38Ezra Klein?

  Annie Lowry, welcome back to the show.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:42Ezra Klein?

  So I think people might imagine that I know everything about this book.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh, no. And it's also, we have very different, like, work habits. So I write almost exclusively between, like, 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM, which is when you're sleeping and getting up to meditate, because you're like a normal person. So I feel like there's a real ships-in-the-night quality to all of this.

• 2:09Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, so this is a huge opportunity for me. So to finally find out what this book is about.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. It comes out shortly, so I'm glad that you'll finally be acquainted with it.

• 2:17Ezra Klein?

  So I want to start simply.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19Ezra Klein?

  What's the time tax?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:48Ezra Klein?

  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 tax as administrative burdens, as a tool of social control.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:02Ezra Klein?

  What do you mean by control there?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  And I don't think that we really think about the way that we have this regressive filter on a lot of progressive policies. They're a way, 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.

• 4:11Ezra Klein?

  See if you're taking drugs.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:24Ezra Klein?

  Can't get a rotisserie chicken at Costco.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't get a rotisserie chicken, but 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.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And I think that that is like a social outcome, too.

• 5:13Ezra Klein?

  A tool of humiliation.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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.

• 5:30Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:58Ezra Klein?

  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 is a very good example of this. Do you want to talk through that?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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. 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, so that, 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.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  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-U.S.A. 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.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  And she uses public assistance, Medicaid, other programs, SNAP. And she was labeled as a fraud risk nine years ago. 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, we, 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.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  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, what is the point here?

• 8:39Ezra Klein?

  But it's not 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.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it takes hours and hours and hours.

• 8:49Ezra Klein?

  And she doesn't have a computer, right?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  She 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, like, get a photo on her cellphone and send it as a fax, because she needed to do that. And she's like, how do I, how do I do this thing? And I'm like, why do you gotta, why do you have to send anything as a fax? But you do.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:29Ezra Klein?

  And it's time she can't spend.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, with her kids.

• 9:32Ezra Klein?

  Working her way out of poverty, being a mother.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Doing anything, right?

• 9:35Ezra Klein?

  Working on her nail business.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:37Ezra Klein?

  And 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.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:49Ezra Klein?

  That being poor is like being sleepless.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:52Ezra Klein?

  Like we've, people have like done this, they have looked at it, they have done all kinds of experiments.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Equivalent to pulling an all nighter.

• 10:00Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:19Ezra Klein?

  The, like, you need to make it easier for people to move forward in their life, not harder.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:26Ezra Klein?

  Like, if you're poor, it's fucking hard enough.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Right. And there's this idea, the 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.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  And it's also going to help you protect about, against fraud. It's going to, you know, increase the public's confidence in a given program. And I think layered on to that is this idea, this almost puritanical notion, if you're getting something, you 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.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  So I don't think that adding administrative burdens to it improved it.

• 11:41Ezra Klein?

  But so then what happens in 96?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Today, 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.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  In 96, the program is required to have work requirements. It's required to have sanctions for non-compliant 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, billion dollars per year. So tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  For 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, okay, that's like reasonable, right?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  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 stated minute, what I'm going to tell them about one of the hardest things that happened in my entire life.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  And so non-compliance 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.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  And the states administer this program often with such cruelty that it doesn't actually do anything.

• 15:04Ezra Klein?

  So I think this gets at the, the big distinction operating across a lot of these programs, which is the programs where we intuitively or by default think people are deserving.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:17Ezra Klein?

  And the programs where we treat them intuitively or by default.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:22Ezra Klein?

  The government does.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:23Ezra Klein?

  With suspicion. They have to prove themselves worthy. And I think it's useful to sort of jump back and forth a little bit between them.

• 15:34Ezra Klein?

  The postal service is kind of an amazing example here of a program, a government operation that just decided everybody is worthy of getting their mail delivered, no matter where they live.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:51Ezra Klein?

  You talk about a art project, I guess, by Steven Brower?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 15:58Ezra Klein?

  At 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?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  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, okay, like we'll take it, you know? It has a stamp on it, we're going 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.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  You don't have to register your address. They deliver mail by skiff in some cases, like I see like those boats that you do this. They deliver mail by mule to the base of the Grand Canyon.

• 17:03Ezra Klein?

  Who, who lives at the base of the Grand Canyon and has a?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  There's a hotel there. And there's a Native American reservation, I believe, is there. There's people down there. They make a good faith effort to get mail to everyone.

• 17:15Ezra Klein?

  But this gets to the question of deserving and deserving. We have decided you're deserving of getting your mail delivered.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Everybody is.

• 17:24Ezra Klein?

  If you live somewhere tricky.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  There's not a question.

• 17:25Ezra Klein?

  Medicare, you turn 65.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 17:29Ezra Klein?

  It happens pretty easily. And we were talking about this in, in the team as we were preparing for this. And, and one of the questions somebody's saying, well, is like, well, that's easy because it's just when people are, 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?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  A pleasant fiction? That's not how it works?

• 18:17Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:47Ezra Klein?

  You 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?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  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 a source of aid and help,

• 19:40Speaker 02

  but also a tremendous threat to them and their children personally. And the government, through programs like this, is imparting a sense of worth on people, political worth, right? It's saying, well, maybe you deserve to be treated like this. Maybe this is how much we care about you. And people absorb that feeling. You get the sense that social security cares about you. You get the sense that the postal service cares about you.

• 20:12Ezra Klein?

  One of the parts of the book I found very moving is in the latter half, you tell these two stories. And one of the people is, she works for sort of a boutique real estate agency. And she gets a bad head injury.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:28Ezra Klein?

  And she's treated, she ends up in what you describe as like a paperwork vortex with the state. But is she and her family sort of react to that as an injustice?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:39Ezra Klein?

  Like, they, I don't know what their income background is, but clearly they're not used to being treated this way by the state.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  She's college educated.

• 20:46Ezra Klein?

  She's college educated.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Her siblings are college educated, yeah.

• 20:49Ezra Klein?

  And you compare it to someone who doesn't come from that, and how much they're just like, yeah, this is the way the state treats me. But it reminded me, and I often think that people, they'll look at how sort of working class voters are often less trusting of the government, right? They vote more Republican now.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:05Ezra Klein?

  And they sort of think there's just a strange, like a false consciousness there. It's all culture issues. But oftentimes, working class voters have terrible experiences with the government.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Awful.

• 21:15Ezra Klein?

  And I think that's actually quite underplayed in why sometimes they are not as enthusiastic about, you know, liberal or leftist government programs as one would think, right? Like, you know, if you've had good experiences with the government, you think, oh, redistribution, it's going to be great for everybody.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:30Ezra Klein?

  But then if you've been on the business end of redistribution, sometimes it has maybe been really humiliating and time consuming for you.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely. This is one of the complications, I think, to the what's the matter with Kansas theory, right?

• 21:44Ezra Klein?

  Which is that these are voters voting against self-interest.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that they're voting against their own self-interest, right? Yes. The people who are middle class, who are college educated, I've spoken with, and there are many who have a bumpy fall down the income ladder and then have to interact with the government as a supplicant who is there begging for help, are traumatized. Often, they're like, wait, you're treating me like I'm poor. And they don't conceive of themselves as being poor. They conceive of themselves as having a hard time, and that's fair and fine. But yes, I think if you are merely looking at income, the lower down you go, you are spending more time interacting with the government, and you're not getting the nice parts, right? Like, you're not getting the,

• 22:30Speaker 02

  ooh, I'm visiting an American embassy abroad parts. You're getting the standing in line and pee in a cup parts. You're getting the, I'm going to humiliate you. I'm going to treat you like you're a fraud risk. But then again, there are some parts of the government that even high-income folks deal with that are absolutely miserable. They just have more capacity to handle it.

• 23:14Ezra Klein?

  I had asked you before this, if you had a favorite time tax, if you had a favorite form, a thing that exemplified what you're talking about here. And so maybe as a way of illustrating what we're actually describing, you said you did. What is it?

• 23:31Speaker 02

  The DHS 1171.

• 23:34Ezra Klein?

  Oh, of course.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  There is a guy named Michael Brennan, who used to run one of the United Ways in Michigan and now runs a firm that helps the government and other, you know, agencies redesign enrollment processes and things like that around people, human-centered design. And he, for years, carried around the DHS 1171 in his pocket, like a little miniature version of it.

• 24:05Ezra Klein?

  You meet the most interesting people.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  I do, I do. I'm an extrovert. I'll yap with anybody. But he, you know, and it reminded me of, right? Like, a priest carrying the Bible or like a lot of politicians are constantly, they love miniature constitutions. And that was because this was the main application for aid in the state of Michigan. And it was 18,000 words and 1,000 questions.

• 24:41Ezra Klein?

  1,000 questions?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  1,000 questions. And you might not have to answer all of those. But regardless, if you're like, I'm not sure if I can feed my kids, this is the form that you're filling out. And so Michael Brennan and his organization, Sevillah, helped to redesign it. But until recently, this was the form. And I have it, if we want to look at it.

• 25:04Ezra Klein?

  Love a prop.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is on kind of like two-sided paper. So it's actually kind of smaller than it, you know?

• 25:13Ezra Klein?

  This is heavy, by the way.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is heavy. And it's really hard.

• 25:16Ezra Klein?

  Surprisingly heavy.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  You even look at it, it's like, it's hard to read. It's like, do I have to do all of this?

• 25:20Ezra Klein?

  Oh, my god.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  So look.

• 25:22Ezra Klein?

  I do want to, I've not seen this form before. This is a lot of boxes.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  It's terrible.

• 25:28Ezra Klein?

  If this person is under 22, complete this section. Who paid for this child's birth expenses? State, parents, another person? What was a marital status of the mother while pregnant with this child? If married or divorced? Marriage date, separation date? Divorce date, order, county, state? Order, county, state? If single, this child's conception date? City? For the same question. Conception, city, state, country? Has an affidavit of parentage or court order named someone as a father?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Where your kid was conceived? Doctors don't ask you that. This is the state telling poor people to go fuck themselves. That's what that is. I cannot imagine how upsetting it must be to already be in a state of risk or distress.

• 26:22Ezra Klein?

  And you're going to the state for help, like it's already difficult.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  And they're like, oh, where was your kid? What day was your kid conceived?

• 26:29Ezra Klein?

  What day was your kid? I don't know what day our kids were conceived.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Nobody does. That's not like a thing. And what is the state telling you when it asks you that?

• 26:44Ezra Klein?

  It's also just the kind of, if you go through this form, it's, it's very intimidating as a form.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  It's hard to read.

• 26:51Ezra Klein?

  It's hard to read.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  It's like, it's enormous.

• 26:54Ezra Klein?

  It tells you a lot that if you, like, I'm just looking at the front. It's like, if you don't give correct information, I mean, what if you get the conception date wrong? I look at something like this, and here's my question for you about it.

• 27:07Ezra Klein?

  Is the way you understand this form that the government here was incompetent, rule-bound, fetishistic of procedure? Or is the way you understand this form, more the way you said it a minute ago, that this is not a government that is not thinking about the time tax? This is a government with exquisite sense of what the time tax can do. This is a government weaponizing the time tax because it does not want people to complete this form. Because it wants you to get it, and its view of you is if you're asking us for help, you should pay. And if you can't pay with money, if we're gonna have to support you, then you better really need it. And the way we know if you really need it is if you will subjugate yourself before us, if you will humiliate yourself in this way.

• 27:54Ezra Klein?

  And that it, you know, in this telling, right, not my view, acts as a virtuous disincentive to people going on the public dole.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I think it is all of the above. Oftentimes, I think that these documents kind of happen by accretion. There's some state laws, there's some federal laws, they ask that you figure this out. Some of it's well-intentioned, like, maybe we'll get you this extra little bit of assistance if we know that you're at risk in these categories. But this is constructed by people who have a law degree and are talking to lobbyists and are wearing suits. And it is constructed to meet the state's needs of like, okay, what do we feel like we need from these people? What are the legal requirements? What, given our processes, do we need?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  This is not a form that is constructed with people in mind. The end user, the citizen, the person who's actually at risk.

• 28:54Ezra Klein?

  But so you're saying, the way you're describing this, you're saying you actually think this is coming from a government that sees rules, not people, not a government that correctly understands what it is attempting to do.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  I think it's all of the above. And I think that we have a great example of this in HR1, which is currently rolling out, which is applying a nationwide work requirement in the Medicaid program.

• 29:16Ezra Klein?

  This is the one big, beautiful bill act.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  One big, beautiful bill act.

• 29:20Ezra Klein?

  So, yeah, describe that. So the main pay for, which does not pay for all the tax cuts, but pays for some of them, are work requirements in Medicaid and SNAP?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it extends them in SNAP. SNAP already has work requirements.

• 29:31Ezra Klein?

  Which is food stamps, the modern name for it.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  And so there's some just straightforward SNAP cuts. So refugees and asylees get cut from the program in some cases. And then in SNAP, food stamps, it takes the work requirement and it extends it to some categories that didn't have to comply with it before, older Americans, for instance. But then what it does is it takes the Medicaid program. And just stop for a second. Medicaid is not a cash benefit. You can't do anything with Medicaid except for get healthcare. So the idea that you would get Medicaid and you would stop working or would just be living on the dole is kind of silly, right?

• 30:19Speaker 02

  But for the first time ever, it is applying a nationwide work requirement to non-disabled adults in the Medicaid program. And that is the engine, the cash engine, driving tax cuts for the wealthy, not because those people are not poor enough to get on Medicaid, but merely because most of those people will not be able to comply with the work requirement because it's so onerous.

• 30:50Ezra Klein?

  This is a, I want to stop here, because both because is a good example and because it's a really massive policy change about to go into effect.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Huge.

• 30:59Ezra Klein?

  You try to think about this, it's like, what is Medicaid for? We think people should be able to have healthcare even if they're poor.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:05Ezra Klein?

  So now you imagine a person who is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you gotta be really poor. 138% of the federal poverty line, which is really low.

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  And either cannot find a job.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:21Ezra Klein?

  Or cannot get it together in a way where they can like work their way through the paperwork and continuously prove that they're looking for a job in the right ways. And different states are gonna implement this, and places will implement this in different ways with different levels of difficulty for the people they are testing.

• 31:43Ezra Klein?

  What is, what about societies improved if that person now has no coverage when they have a heart attack?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Beats me, and they're gonna go to the ER, and it's gonna be uncompensated care that somebody will pay. Just not Washington. So will the individual pay because they're not gonna get treated for that health condition that they have? I think about this all the time. I'm a type 1 diabetic, no insulin, I'm dead in a couple of weeks, I don't know, maybe longer. And you are creating this burden where many people on Medicaid are already working if they can, notably. They just don't make enough, or they don't have a job, like a nice fancy job like we have that comes with health insurance, right? Or they can only get, you know, a part-time job or whatever. They have caretaking responsibilities.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  These are not generally people who are just like sitting at home, not working.

• 32:39Ezra Klein?

  And they're not people who have other health insurance options for the most part. I mean, the thing that I always thought was the most telling about this move was that it was not done on its own. You could imagine a world where they did like a big Medicaid reform package. And they decided, we want to have work requirements, and they thought about how to implement them. I would oppose that, like, all the way through.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:56Ezra Klein?

  But it was telling that this was done to get savings. So richer people get tax cuts.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And there was this tremendous, you know, Donald Trump promised that he wasn't cutting Medicaid, right? This is gonna be easy to comply with. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna get people, like, they kept on citing young men, young men who aren't working to get Medicaid. We're gonna get them to work.

• 33:23Ezra Klein?

  We're also the cheapest people to insure, by the way.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't really use a lot of healthcare, young men, generally. But we actually know that putting a work requirement in Medicaid doesn't raise employment rates because some states have had work requirements. There's some local programs, they've gotten waivers basically to implement them. And when they do this, the employment rate doesn't go up. What happens is that it is a big paperwork clusterfuck, and it's expensive for the state to administer, and it's hard for people to comply with. And then they lose their insurance, and they find out when they're in the ER. Right? Because oftentimes, if you are, you know, a younger person, you're managing this, that, and the other,

• 34:06Speaker 02

  you might not really realize that you're not insured until all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I've dislocated my shoulder, or I have something that really needs to be checked out. So yes, as you were saying, this does not work unless it kicks people off. And they said it wasn't a cut. They said they're not cutting. But how are you gonna get a trillion dollars from the program without cutting? I would also note that the predominant recipients of government benefits, they're, you know, they're always saying it's about the young guys who don't want to work. They're women. Women who are much more likely to be taking care of kids, much more likely to spend a lot more time doing that, much more likely to be the person who is managing the household. And I think that there is a lack of integrity.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  I think it would be one thing to come out and say, we're cutting. We're kicking people off Medicaid. They should figure out how to get insurance in some other way. That is a terrible policy, but at least it's honest. This?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  This isn't honest. And I was talking with somebody who runs a health clinic that serves an indigent, mostly homeless, population of folks, many of whom have a substance abuse problem. And these people, the treatment that they often need is inpatient psychiatric treatment and then wraparound supports to help them get stable. And we know that that is the best way to help them. That is often what they are seeking, that is the care that they get. They're all gonna lose their insurance. Because they're not gonna be able to comply with this. They don't have phones, they don't have computers. How are you supposed to comply with a work requirement if you're sleeping in a tent?

• 35:44Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that people are very well rewarded for in modernity is the kind of mind that is very good at managing tasks and bureaucracies and information that like works with symbolic information very smoothly, that has a lot of executive function, that wakes up in the morning and, you know, does your morning pages and like writes out your task list. By the end of the night, you're laughing at me because...

• 36:09Speaker 02

  You're describing yourself.

• 36:12Ezra Klein?

  I hew to a task list.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  The great irony is that I have married somebody who's good at this stuff because I... Do I have a driver's license? Do I know where it is? Nope.

• 36:21Ezra Klein?

  I think one, yes to the first, and no to the second.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it exists someplace in time and space. I've literally talked to my therapist on the phone, and we have opened the mail together.

• 36:33Ezra Klein?

  So, good insight there, good insight.

• 36:38Ezra Klein?

  If you don't have that, right? If, for all kinds of reasons, you know, people have addiction issues.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:47Ezra Klein?

  People grew up in homes where they were badly traumatized. People are operating under all kinds of other burdens. People's minds are neurodivergent in a certain way. People have terrible social anxiety.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:00Ezra Klein?

  That makes it hard to do the things that society rewards you for. Things that come very naturally to other people. We like pretend that people are all successful because they either worked hard or they didn't. And everybody knows it's bullshit. And the things also that help you work hard and that make you a compulsive worker, you often don't choose those either. And so you take somebody who is already struggling with this, and maybe that is part of why they are poor, because like they just have trouble navigating modernity. They have depression, they have anxiety. They have other health issues. And then you begin to pile bureaucratic procedure on them. Pile forms you have to fill out.

• 37:40Ezra Klein?

  Forms that like routinely I get in late or that we get in late.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  That I, that I get in late. To go back to one thing you were saying before, yes, I think that high income people have it often a completely different orientation towards this kind of paperwork. And I really like the, the Bernard Suits idea of having a lucery attitude, right? The lucery attitude is what makes a game a game. Arbitrary rules and this like, okay, I'm going to try and win. And this is the attitude that many high income people bring to like, for instance, a college application. Yale is going to make you spend a hundred hours on the application. You're like, oh, that's another place where I can achieve, right? This is a meritocratic idea of, you know, the harder you work, the, the better a boy you are, right?

• 38:30Ezra Klein?

  Or if you, you have high priced accountants, high priced tax preparers. It's a game you're trying to win.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  We've talked about this, that sometimes you meet a very high income person in our line of work and the degree to which they talk about tax avoidance, they really talk about it all the time. They're like kind of getting off on it. Yeah, exactly. Um, and you know, and I think that we can both take this sort of, and it's actually, it's not just pure students, Elizabethan idea of there's deserving and undeserving. And we're going to separate these to, I think that importantly in the United States, this has to get filtered through the prism of race, right? The reason that we do not have these kind of universally accessible, simple benefits is anti-black racism, right? A lot of these big programs are set up during Jim Crow.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  I know that this sounds kind of overly declarative, but I don't think it's, it's wrong.

• 39:25Ezra Klein?

  You brought up deserving undeserving poor. And one reason that a lot of these benefits look like this, including in blue states under democratic governments that believe in Medicaid.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:37Ezra Klein?

  That believe in TANF, that believe in all kinds of tax credits and hands up and all the rest of it is twofold, that one fraud is a real problem.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:51Ezra Klein?

  And two, that even just politically, if you believe in these programs, if they develop a reputation.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:59Ezra Klein?

  For helping people for whom that help is not deserved.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:03Ezra Klein?

  The program will be destroyed, right? This is function what happens to welfare, right? We have TANF because of the view was, and this was racialized and this was wrong in many cases, but it was wrong in literally every case, that welfare reform is helping people that, you know, middle America didn't think should be helped. And that got strong enough that a Democrat was the one who ended up gutting it.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:27Ezra Klein?

  So what about the arguments, you know, that actual policymakers make for doing things this way?

• 40:35Speaker 02

  I think it's important when you're thinking about the shift from AFDC to TANF. So this is what happens in 96.

• 40:41Ezra Klein?

  Old welfare to.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Old welfare to new welfare. And old welfare, it used to be an entitlement. If you met the criteria, you got it. That's not true anymore at all. You can meet the criteria. This is true for a lot of public programs, actually. Housing vouchers, that kind of thing. You can meet all the criteria, you might not get it. Um, which is crazy to high income people, I think, where it's almost always like you meet the criteria, you're going to get it.

• 41:05Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, if you have a mortgage, you get the mortgage interest deduction.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not shuffling around who gets it and who doesn't.

• 41:10Ezra Klein?

  If you're eligible for section eight vouchers, you may not.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you might not, you know, and you, or you might wait 10 years, 12 years, right? And it might not be obvious to you why some people are getting it and some, it's often, you know, not entirely obvious to the people within those organizations either, I would note. But, um, yes, the shift to AFDC to TANF is driven not wholly,

• 41:37Speaker 02

  but at least strongly by racial concerns, not fraud concerns. Those come together, right? These are two sides of the same coin. The originator, the, the program that comes like way earlier is this mother's pension program, which is used almost, is run at the state level. It's used almost exclusively by white women in which you, you know, if you were a good widow or a woman who had been abandoned and you had kids, you would have kind of a social worker come and it was very paternalistic. But, you know, it was supposed to be wages for being a mother and doing the most important work in American life. This is like a old progressive era of policy, right?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  But then, uh, uh, when you get ADC, which then becomes AFDC, this is complicated part of social security, um, because it's an entitlement, uh, because black women are more likely to be low wage, you know, when they have kids, yeah, they use the program. And the entire program becomes about, you know, the, the media conception of the program. Whenever they show images, there's a really great study by Martin Guylens showing that whenever they show images, they're not showing white women anymore, even though black women are never a majority user of the program. They are never, they still aren't. Uh, you know, it's these black families in urban areas.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And that is partially along with concerns about the rising cost and everything else is what leads to this backlash that you can actually trace the way that politicians are talking about it. They stopped talking about kids, they start talking about moms and they start saying that, well, these moms need to be working. And, you know, they start saying, well, welfare is a work program and it transforms. And that leads to 96, which then leads to us there. So I would just note that I think that when you are thinking about fraud, it's really important to think about, um, the racial diversity in this country and the way that that has changed the way that we set our public programs up. Second thing is that there would be way less fraud if the programs were simpler and easier,

• 43:46Speaker 02

  right? If you have fewer rules and the government does more work to determine like, oh, okay, we're going to look at your tax returns and figure out if you actually get this. We're not going to have asset tests and all these other little kind of fussy, finicky things. There would be fewer people getting overpayments, underpayments, inappropriate payments. I would note that we have not a great sense of how much fraud there is in these programs. We have an improper payment error, right?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Which is, you know, just right, like when they go back and they look, did you get too much, did you get too little? A lot of it is driven by the, by the complexity of the program itself and the fact that the government is not doing the work. It's these people who are kind of pulling together forms or, you know, filling out this and oh gosh, who could imagine anybody filling this out incorrectly? And yes, there's fraud, there's absolutely fraud. I'm not saying that there isn't.

• 44:44Ezra Klein?

  Fraud is both real and whose fraud we choose to care about is telling.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Who does a lot of the Medicaid and Medicare fraud? Doctors.

• 44:54Ezra Klein?

  Or the, um, heads of large organizations like Rick Scott, a Senator from Florida, who ran a, I believe is a for-profit hospital organization that was one of the largest fraud that had to do one of the largest fraud settlements with Medicare in history.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:08Ezra Klein?

  Separately, Donald Trump.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  You gotta be real fancy to do a big Medicare fraud.

• 45:12Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump pardoned, um, pardoned or commuted, I don't remember, but did one of the two, um, somebody who had settled on the largest fraud cases with Medicare more recently. You, you, you do have real fraud on the individual, on the part of individuals. On the other hand, Trump and the Republicans gutting the IRS audit division has made fraud a lot easier for high income taxpayers. You know, they are not going after Medicare and Medicaid fraud, um, in the way they could. I mean, there are a lot of way, like the biggest frauds come from organized actors, both legitimate and illegitimate.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:48Ezra Klein?

  Who are able to do kind of complex frauds that are not about like putting the wrong name down on a form.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's unbundling services. It's complicated. You gotta, you gotta.

• 45:59Ezra Klein?

  Fake, it's buying like leaked information online and using that to apply for unemployment.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Criminal groups, it's, you know.

• 46:06Ezra Klein?

  And you do, I mean, in Minnesota, right? Like the kind of smaller frauds which are real, whereas organizational.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. I can tell you this, there would be more improper payments in the home mortgage interest deduction tax program, which to be clear, we should think of as a benefit program because it is, even if we don't frame it that way. If you had to do piss tests, how many people would get, would get their benefit revoked for that? I wonder. If you had to do this form instead of like ticking a single box that actually your accountant is doing, because you don't do your own taxes?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  You know?

• 46:41Ezra Klein?

  Well, this goes to maybe the time tax and also like a good place to see the choices we're making that the most people interact with in America, which is the tax system itself.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:53Ezra Klein?

  So this is part of the book.

• 46:56Ezra Klein?

  How does our tax system work from this perspective? And how could it?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  In Japan, for the most part, if you're earning a salary, you don't ever have to do your taxes. Japanese taxes already just does it for you. In a number of European countries, you can like, I forget whether it's Sweden or Finland, you do it by text message. Norway, sorry to the Nordics.

• 47:30Ezra Klein?

  Do they all look the same to you, Annie?

• 47:32Speaker 02

  I can't remember which one. I'm so sorry. The Danes are over here and they're like, it's not us. And in many other peer countries, they'll just send you a form that's mostly filled out and you can figure out if you want to do any changes and then maybe you sign it, you send it back.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  It is like risible. You know, when Europeans are like, wait, your healthcare system works how? You got billed for what? Like, you know, the whole, right? Like you ask a European like, oh, how much did it, did you have to pay to get that baby? Pardon? Um, sort of similarly, I think if people understood that the IRS, I'm not saying they're not like a competent and professional agency at doing what they're doing. And in fact, I know a lot of civil servants at the IRS that are like chomping at the bit to be able to do people's taxes for them. They're not allowed to. They're not allowed to.

• 48:33Ezra Klein?

  Here's a crazy thing about this, because I think it's worth like getting at the mechanism here. The IRS has all the information.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  They do.

• 48:38Ezra Klein?

  The reason the IRS can come after you fill out your taxes and say, you underpaid?

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:44Ezra Klein?

  Is because they know how much you're supposed to pay.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:47Ezra Klein?

  And given that they know how much you're supposed to pay, they could just tell you how much you're supposed to pay. And in other countries, they just tell you how much you're supposed to pay. And then you're like, okay, great. And then you pay it. We even had a pilot program of letting the IRS tell you how much you're supposed to pay in direct file and Trump just killed it.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:03Ezra Klein?

  And people liked it.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Direct file. It was great. There's two things. There's two things here. So one is that the US tax system is so complex. There are so many write offs and kind of arcane, fussy little provisions that do require people to tell the IRS. But most people, that's like not true for. Most Americans take the standard deduction, which means that you're not itemizing things. It's nine in 10? Take the standard deduction? The second is that there's a legal prohibitions on data sharing between US government agencies. So HHS might have some information on you.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  They can't send it to the IRS very easily, for the most part. These systems don't talk to each other and very often in other countries, they do. And for a lot of Americans, the idea of having a government that has a unitary repository of all of this information and it's all connected is really terrifying. We have very little social trust and I think correctly. Why would we?

• 50:17Speaker 02

  However, you can always give people the option. Make it a permission. I want the government to fill up my taxes for me. I want the government to search for benefit programs and then go get the data from the state tax office and the IRS. You know, just think about optionality. I think a lot of really low income people might be like, yeah, if I could just tick a box and have them do as much as they could, that would be great. And I think that letting databases talk to each other with permission is different than probably having it in a big database.

• 50:51Ezra Klein?

  So I want to stop here because one of the moments in the book where you said something that just like stopped me a little cold was you went to Estonia. I remember when you went to Estonia. You didn't tell me much about that trip, so I read about it in your book.

• 51:09Ezra Klein?

  And you talk about Estonia's only once policy.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:14Ezra Klein?

  Like, this was so utopic.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:19Ezra Klein?

  That I almost had to read about it. What, what is the Estonia only once policy?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  So Estonia creates a government de novo not that long ago. Right?

• 51:29Ezra Klein?

  Post Soviet.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. They get their independence back and it's all really young people that are, not that this is the most important thing, but I do think it's interesting in the history. Often the people who are putting a government together in their like twenties and thirties, a lot of them are not actually retirement age now. And, or just barely retirement age now. And they are extremely poor. They are financially distressed. They need foreign investment and they need the support of institutions like the IMF. So they want to also, after the Soviet experience, they want to have a government that people kind of trust and believe in.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  And they end up putting together the most like technologically advanced government, I think perhaps on earth.

• 52:26Ezra Klein?

  Almost certainly.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:28Ezra Klein?

  Like, at least in terms of service delivery.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they have this policy that if you tell any part of the Estonian government a single piece of information, I had a kid, I switched addresses. You only tell the government once, only once. So like, if you tell your kid's school, you know, like, here's our new address, it just updates it with every other agency. And they have this unified system of benefits that you can go online and see like your voting record, your property records, you know, access your medical, right? And I was sitting with a woman who was showing me this and I was like, I don't even know

• 53:13Speaker 02

  how I would get all, like, you know, your, your educational records, right? Like, I was like, does the government have any idea where I, the public school where I went to elementary school? How would you even know? And so, yeah, going back to the IRS, there is a challenge. But again, it's like, they don't want to meet it. They want you to have to do your own taxes. And so, you know, this costs Americans.

• 53:37Ezra Klein?

  But it's not they. It's not the IRS that wants you to do your own taxes. It is Republicans in Congress. It's not Congress, it's Republicans.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:45Ezra Klein?

  Because Republicans forever have wanted taxes to be hard, so you hate the government.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:49Ezra Klein?

  And it's not just because they're in the pocket of like big tax preparer, although they are a little bit in the pocket of big tax preparer, like Intuit and others have done a lot of lobbying on this.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  These companies lobby so heavily.

• 54:00Ezra Klein?

  It's a big industry now.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  So heavily.

• 54:02Ezra Klein?

  But if every time you meet the government, it is smooth and seamless and you walk away thinking that government's pretty great.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:10Ezra Klein?

  Then you're going to want more government.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 54:12Ezra Klein?

  And Republicans don't want you to want more government. And so it creates this kind of.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Kind of, don't they now? Right? Like, they want government for some people. There's a whole thing about Donald Trump.

• 54:22Ezra Klein?

  But they don't want a fishing government, although I will say about Doge. One of the things I just remember thinking about with Doge, you and I talking about, is a number of times when I would.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  I'm gonna walk out of here.

• 54:34Ezra Klein?

  When I'd be reporting on the way social benefits worked or something and I would run into all of these privacy considerations in the government, we couldn't, we can't do the obvious thing because the IRS won't share any data.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:46Ezra Klein?

  And it's like, that's a firewall and we just can't get through it, even though that's how we could make everything work a lot better. And then it turned out that that wasn't a firewall. And I'm not saying what Elon Musk and Doge did was legal. It was probably not legal. It turned out to be doable.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Look, one way or another, guess who gets to change laws? Congress?

• 55:05Ezra Klein?

  You could make things work better. We have taken too much of how the government works as settled and unchangeable and it's not. And Doge was, you know, running through walls destructively.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:18Ezra Klein?

  But one thing they really showed was a lot of things that say the Obama or Biden administrations treated as sacrosanct.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:27Ezra Klein?

  Those were guidelines. Those were recommendations from your lawyers.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:31Ezra Klein?

  And maybe it's worth it to start breaking some guidelines and rewriting rules in order to make the government work better.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  There's a deeper issue here, which is that Congress does not see itself as the administrator of anything.

• 55:45Ezra Klein?

  You know, my view is Congress should get rid of the filibuster and then when Democrats are in power.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:49Ezra Klein?

  Like, they should actually do the things they say they're going to do and vote on a party line to do them and then see if the public likes them. And then if the public does like it, they can be reelected. And that's how democracy is supposed to work. Instead of this, like, we can't do anything and we would like you to study congressional procedure to understand why.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Let's have a parliament on the bumper sticker, right? Like, take away presidential power and think of a prime minister. It's gonna be really popular.

• 56:15Ezra Klein?

  The NSA wants to abolish the Senate. This is the moderate position now.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:19Ezra Klein?

  The thing you're really debating in this book, pretty explicitly, is the federalization of powers.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:25Ezra Klein?

  That you do not like. How many programs are state administered? You definitely don't like it when it goes down to the county level. Like, you're, you're arguing for a simpler, but bigger and more national government.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yes. Things should be federalized.

• 56:41Ezra Klein?

  What do you want to federalize?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. So there, there are some constitutional issues here. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not going to get into them. Yes, Medicaid, federalize it. UI, unemployment insurance, federalize it.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  TANF, if you're gonna have it, federalize it. Any program, yeah, this is my bumper sticker is like, I hate laboratories of democracy. The federal government is better at doing this. They are.

• 57:11Ezra Klein?

  Why?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  For a few reasons. One, they don't have balanced budget requirements. Right? This is actually like a really big thing. States and cities do. The second is just like a simple. Who, like, how many agencies are we going to have doing the same work? Type question. There's 56 Medicaid programs.

• 57:31Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. What happens when you move?

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a constant, right? Like, it happens all of the time.

• 57:36Ezra Klein?

  And if you're like, housing insecure, you move a lot.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. And I think that there is a floor that so many state and local programs sink below, that that seems like a much more important issue to me than laboratories of democracy that actually go above and beyond and have great benefits. Although it's very interesting to me that it's not necessarily blue states that have better administration than red states, because they're under the same constraints, right?

• 58:03Ezra Klein?

  And they're also often so highly proceduralized or in government that they're less effective. Like, you often have, like, more generous benefits in a much more complex bureaucracy.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. It is not the sort of thing, like, California is a nightmare on a lot of this. They've gotten better on some fronts, but it's just, it's not like a simple, you know, the more liberal, it doesn't map on like that at all. It really, really doesn't. But yes, if you could take these programs and federalize them and make it such that the agencies administering them were responsible for outcomes and saw themselves as a service delivery organization, yes, it would be a lot better. It would be way better.

• 59:08Ezra Klein?

  Your first book was about universal basic income.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:11Ezra Klein?

  And when I got to the end of it, I came to think these books were more connected than I had thought when you were writing it.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. They're twins.

• 59:19Ezra Klein?

  It seemed to me that you were moving towards something that's more like, the government should do fewer things, but do them clearly and well, right? Like, this seemed to me, in the anti-poverty dimension, like, it was sort of an argument for a negative income tax, right? Not quite a UBI, where it's like Bill Gates gets it, but, you know, something where if you're below a level, you just get it. We don't test you. We don't put you through hoops.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:43Ezra Klein?

  We just say, there's a level in this country people do not need to fall beneath. I mean, the, the sort of conservative argument over the years for something like UBI or negative income taxes, which Richard Nixon pushed at one moment.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  What I am proposing is that the federal government build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children that cannot care for itself, and wherever in America that family may live.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Excellent precedent up until.

• 1:00:12Ezra Klein?

  The government should do fewer things would go better. He had some problems, Cambodia, I'm not a huge fan of.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm not here to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. There's a lot of things to be concerned about there.

• 1:00:21Ezra Klein?

  But a fascinating figure.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 1:00:23Ezra Klein?

  That, that seems like the kind of thing you're envisioning here.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, look at the child tax credit, right? So the child tax credit exists, there's this brief moment during the pandemic where they give a really big CTC, and it reaches 80% of target families, the IRS administers it instead of some welfare agency somewhere. What does it do? It cuts child poverty in half. And granted, that's mostly due to just the sheer amount, the giant money cannon, but the administrative simplicity, I think, is actually important there. Most people don't have to do anything, the money just shows up. And so the problem, I think, with running so many programs through the tax code, where it really is much more efficient, and the IRS has become a crucial welfare

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  benefits administrator, even though it doesn't like to think of itself that way, both the IRS and Congress, I guess, is that then people don't notice, you know?

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  There's amazing research by Suzanne Matler of Cornell that shows that high-income people, no matter how much they're getting in government benefits, they're always like, well, I don't use any government program. And that's because it's like their accountant is figuring it out. I think that they might just not conceive of it that way, because we are not beating somebody over the head with, like, hey, you got a home mortgage interest deduction, which you didn't have to pee in a cup for, whereas it's really obvious to people getting safety net benefits that they're getting them, because they have to go to these offices and fill out all of this paperwork and everything. So I do think that there is this kind of

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  downside to tax programs, which is that, you know, they become invisible. But, look, they're way easier for the government to administer, way cheaper, and you're much more likely to get them to the people who you want to get them.

• 1:02:17Ezra Klein?

  You could also make some pretty simple design tweaks and make things happening through the tax code more visible. I mean, it could come as a large check. It's not that difficult.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:26Ezra Klein?

  I remember, there's this whole story from the Biden era, where Biden, like, he's like, I'm not going to put my, like, big signature face on a check like Donald Trump. It's like, you should have put your big signature.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, put your giant, giant face on the check.

• 1:02:39Ezra Klein?

  Check like Donald Trump.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Ezra Klein?

  So what do you say to conservatives? Because I've seen this case pushed against your book. It's like, look, this is a great description of how government fails. It is a great description of government complexity. It is a great description of government incompetence, which you agree is at least part of the story here.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Oh, totally.

• 1:02:56Ezra Klein?

  So ending in a stirring call for bigger government, more government, is fundamentally paradoxical. Government just do less and be more out of people's lives and not take in waste so much of their money and their time.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Do they want to take away social security?

• 1:03:15Ezra Klein?

  Some of them do.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  A lot of, oh, gosh. A lot of big programs work great. They work really, really well. I think it's not a crazy thing for Americans to demand that the government that they pay for works in the way that the governments around the world work. We have low standards. We're letting these assholes get away with murder. I mean it. There's no constituency for this right now. It's a thing I think about all the time. There's no kind of way to say, hey, when you're creating, like, a partially refundable tax credit, something, something that's like means-tested, like, that is stupid and you shouldn't do that because you're asking a lot of people and nobody's going to use that. And who needs

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  that fuss? And I think that we should. We should say, hey, we're paying you to do this. You take $7 trillion a year. Be competent.

• 1:04:12Ezra Klein?

  You have a great line in the book where you say that politicians care a lot about whether or not a program exists, but not really whether it's accessible.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Totally. And it's also, and again, I think it's, the civil servants often, they really want these programs to work. They would love to use, they're experts on these programs, and we don't listen to them either. They aren't like people who are stakeholders. It's not like, you know, you have them coming forward and being like, I think that we could make these really good changes, and that would result in, right? Like, a lot of them want to do that, and they're statutorily not allowed. You'd have to get a law passed. You'd have to get a regulation passed. Who at the White House is going to listen to you?

• 1:04:49Ezra Klein?

  You're not allowed to speak out. You'd get fired.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:04:52Ezra Klein?

  Can't go write an op-ed from the, I mean, I know through you how many people you talk to in the bureaucracy who are just like hair on fire, like funneling you information about how it doesn't work.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:05:02Ezra Klein?

  But nobody wants to make government programs work better

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:05:05Ezra Klein?

  than the people who are held back from administering them correctly.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:10Ezra Klein?

  Like, if you've devoted your life to getting people snap.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:13Ezra Klein?

  And now you are not able to get people snap, it drives you crazy.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely. If we treated people as experts in their own experience, by which I mean, people who are using these programs and the people administering them, I think things would work much better. Jen Palca, I think, has, like, the greatest, you know, exegesis of this idea in Recoding America.

• 1:05:34Ezra Klein?

  Author of Recoding America.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Guest of the podcast.

• 1:05:37Ezra Klein?

  Past guest for the show.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Right? Where she describes it as this, like, bureaucratic anxiety cycle. So what happens is, you know, Congress spends some money, they have some program, the program doesn't work well, and so they put more rules on the bureaucrats who become then less capable of actually administering the program. They get called in before Congress. And so you just end up in this kind of doom loop of, like, Congress telling them, telling these bureaucrats, okay, well, here's, in an even more specific way, what I think you should be doing, instead of saying to the bureaucrats, we trust you. Here's the goal, get it done.

• 1:06:13Ezra Klein?

  We were talking earlier about our government bumper stickers, and I've thought about this before. Mine is actually simpler, fairer, faster. I feel like Democrats should run, and they're going to say, the government will be simpler, fairer, and faster. And they should actually make that happen. They should make the policies simple. They should make them way less corrupted by money. They should actually pass, try to pass, in fact, a constitutional amendment on money. And they need to make them faster, right? Abundance is a lot about speed. This book has a lot, in the end, about speed, too. And I think when people talk about making government efficient, it doesn't mean anything. And I don't think Democrats often know what they mean when they're talking about. They tend to mean saving money when they talk about government efficiency.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Ezra Klein?

  But you want the government to be efficient from the perspective of the person it benefits. And that means it's simple to use, it treats them fairly and respectfully, and they get what they need from it fast, so their time isn't taxed.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I think that this is a great way to do it. The thing that I think a lot about is the political economy here, right? If that was a way to win votes, and if people wanted that, why doesn't it happen? Because the time tax, it's like a problem, it is a giant mess of a million different problems administered at different parts of government, and that is, in fact, part of the problem. And I think that the feedback loops are broken in a lot of cases here. So what I mean by feedback loops is that the people who use the most punitive, stupid government programs.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  They get turned off from civic engagement. So they don't become a constituency demanding for the program to get better. But I think you can actually look at some politicians that have tackled this. And it's pretty popular when you can actually do it. So Zohar Mumdani in New York has had this whole, you know, like, if you're a small business, it shouldn't take you a million, you know, pieces of paper and all this time to just like, get a very basic business license. That's great and almost like, kind of like Republican politics. And I think that, you know, could that politics work for people? I think so. I think it'll be very interesting to watch what people think of Medicaid after the work requirement comes in. Because I can guarantee you that the stories are going to be about people who can't get

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  cancer treatment. Marginal cases who cannot prove that they are disabled because doctors don't know what condition they have and they don't have a doctor to diagnose them. Isn't that part of the reason that they need health insurance? This is going to kill people. And so I don't think that it's going to be more popular for the Medicaid program. And so there's this piece of political science research that actually showed that administrative burdens do not just make recipients less likely to engage civically. They kind of sour entire communities on the government because they're like, wait, why are you treating us like this? And, you know, I would want to see more research on this. I'm really interested, but it makes sense to me.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Do people like a government that treats people this way?

• 1:09:21Ezra Klein?

  I wondered whether or not the Trump Medicaid and SNAP work requirements are going to create an opening. I mean, when Republicans cut government sharply, they often create the conditions for a politics end of expansion because people don't like the effect of the cuts. We've seen this happen many, many times before. People feel the cuts all of a sudden, or they fear the cuts. All of a sudden, they recognize what they are losing or might lose. And it creates focus and it creates like the possibility to do something. Now they've decided to do a massive cut. It's going to hit many of their voters.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Ezra Klein?

  Many Trump voters on Medicaid or on SNAP. It's going to hit them in very unpleasant, complicated ways. And I think give, you know, the opposition an opportunity to make this kind of burden an issue and not just sort of argue for, you know, expansion or restoration of funding, but actually say like, this is not what your relationship with government should be. This is not what government should do to you. Make it easier for rich people to cheat on their taxes and harder for you to get Medicaid.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  I think that that's absolutely true. I'm very concerned that SNAP could collapse in some states. Because one of the things it does is it says to the states, if you have an error rate that is above, I think it's 6%, which like 40 states have a, again, improper payments, not fraud rate, improper payments rate above that. It makes them pay for part of the benefit, which they've never had to do before. And I'm very concerned that states will not be able to do this and they will not have the money to cover it and they might just not have SNAP. I've talked to hospital administrators and state legislators who are like, what are we going to do when Medicaid gets gutted? How are we going to keep hospitals open? They are going to destabilize whole health systems.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  I think that they might drive doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists out of the profession. They are creating a mass administrative burden, a mass time tax, the like of which we have never seen. 96 TANF reform, like that was so tiny in comparison to this.

• 1:11:33Ezra Klein?

  Much smaller program.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Almost 25 million people. They're sapping billions of hours of people's time to give money to rich people. Yes, I would hope that this would create an opening for actual root to stem reform. But I think that you could develop a politics of this.

• 1:11:49Ezra Klein?

  And for most Americans, you could never have to fill out a tax form or pay an accountant for that again.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  Can you imagine how nice that would be? It'd be really nice.

• 1:11:58Ezra Klein?

  I cannot. I think that's a good place to end. Little, little moment of imagining nice things. Always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  So while I was thinking of the books to recommend to the audience, you and I had created this list of books that we mentioned to each other constantly. So one is the book that has changed how I have read every memoir, every autobiography since. I'm not saying it's a good book. I'm saying it's a deranged object that I think everybody should read. And this is a book called My Silent War by Kim Philby. So Kim Philby is a spy, prominent British spy. And he almost becomes the head of MI6. He's a Soviet agent. He's a Soviet agent.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  And he eventually defects to the Soviet Union and drinks himself to death in Moscow. And, you know, I think that there was perhaps some expectation of like a warm reception there for all that he had done for the Soviet cause. But of course, the Soviets don't trust him. He's a liar, right? He just spent his whole life letting the people that he grew up with, the people that he worked right next to, right? Like sending them home in body bags to their widows. And so many books have been written about this guy. Many, like Ben McIntyre's books kind of come up in this. He is like a kind of a figure in some of the novels of Graham Greene, because they actually knew each other because Graham Greene was a spy.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  John Le Carré, I don't know what is in John Le Carré's heart, but I think that he hates this guy more than he has ever hated anybody else. And, but he writes this, this book that is, I kept on like waiting for them to be, right? Is he, is he actually like a communist or a socialist? Like, what is the, and there's nothing there. What a wasted life. What a miserable human being. And I'm not saying that all memoirs should be read with a skeptical system. But so that's one of my books, which I think many of your readers will like. The second is a book that I consider.

• 1:14:15Ezra Klein?

  Annie really mentions this book a lot. She's not lying about this. Kim Philby comes up constantly.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  World's historical piece of shit. What a world's historical piece of shit Kim Philby is. The second is a book that I consider most insightful about politics and political thinking. And it is, neither of us are sports watchers, but it is a book about sports. It is about UNC and Duke. It is called To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe. I bring this up constantly. And it is about, you know, this famous football JK rivalry. Sorry.

• 1:14:50Ezra Klein?

  It's basketball.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  It's about the offsides rule. And yes, it's about basketball. Sorry. By Will Blythe. It's really, really beautifully written. But this book is about, right? Like how habits, how acting this rivalry out like inculcates the rival risk mindset that's all occurring within people who live within like 12 miles of each other is kind of one of the fun parts about it. And then my third hobby horse book, which I think people talk about this book all the time, but I feel like a lot of people have never actually read it, is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. It will blow your hair back. The reason we don't have, I'm a huge listener of Manosphere podcasts, along with yours.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  I'm a really big listener of Joe Rogan. And the reason I bring it up all the time is I'm like, has Joe read Gender Trouble? Because wow. I mean, he's camp. This is not like an original point of mine, but he has such a fascinating conception of masculinity and it's enacted in such a wonderfully camp way.

• 1:16:01Ezra Klein?

  This is such a take.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  This is obvious.

• 1:16:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm not saying it's wrong.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  This is like table stakes. Have me on, Joe Rogan. I'd love to talk about paperwork with you.

• 1:16:15Ezra Klein?

  Paperwork and your performance of gender.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Ezra Klein?

  I would watch that episode of Rogan.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  I think it's beautiful. I really, really do. I think it's really, really interesting. And one of the things that I think is kind of interesting is there's this idea of just like manly men with the testosterone. And one of the points made in this book is right, like you learn what gender is by enacting gender. And by this iterative process of emulation, of putting on the muscle tee and.

• 1:16:47Ezra Klein?

  These books are kind of all the same book in a way.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  These are all the same book.

• 1:16:49Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  These are all the, this is why I brought them together, that I'm like, if you want to understand psychology, don't read, well, I don't know how to understand.

• 1:16:57Ezra Klein?

  You don't think you're way into actions, you act your way into thoughts.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. These are all the same book in very different ways, in very, very different ways.

• 1:17:07Ezra Klein?

  Annie Lowry, thank you very much.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Thank you.