This Is Why People Hate the Government

Produced by Annie Galvin

This Is Why People Hate the Government

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the big problems in left-wing politics is that the very people who Democrats, liberals and socialists think should be the most excited about the big, new government programs intended to help them are often the least excited — and are often voting for the party that wants to cut government.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

One reason for this, a reason I think we don’t talk about nearly enough, is that oftentimes their experience with the government has been 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 Lowrey 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, so we talk about this a lot at home. She joins me now.

Ezra Klein: Annie Lowrey, welcome back to the show.

Annie Lowrey: Thank you for having me.

So I think people might imagine that I know everything about this book. But, in fact, when you live with a writer, they will not let you ask anything about their book while they’re working on it.

Oh gosh, no. And 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, so this is a huge opportunity for me to finally find out what this book is about. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Yeah. I’m glad that you’ll finally be acquainted with it.

So I want to start simply. What’s the time tax?

The time tax is the burden of work — whether that’s emotional work, logistical work, 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.

You’re sort of describing it here as irksome, but you sometimes have another definition I’ve heard you use that I have always found very vivid, where you describe the time tax as administrative burdens as a tool of social control.

What do you mean by “control” there?

These things seem neutral. There’s this understanding that if you’re going to get something, there’s going to be some paperwork.

But these are not frequently purposeful. They are designed to make people feel good about themselves and their relationship vis-à-vis the government — or feel bad about themselves and their relationship vis-à-vis the government.

So they’re one of the ways that we construct class. They’re a way that we make sure that some people can get something and make sure that some people can’t.

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.

They’re, in some ways, just social control. We use work requirements to supposedly get people to work. They’re not terribly effective at that, depending on the program. We can use them to encourage people to get an education. We can use it to shape economic decisions, household financial decisions ——

To see if you’re taking drugs.

Yeah. What can you buy with this? With the SNAP program, you have to get food that you’re cooking yourself. You can’t get hot food. So you can’t ——

Can’t get a rotisserie chicken at Costco. It’s one of the examples in the book ——

Can’t get a rotisserie chicken, but you can get food that you microwave at your house. That’s actually not just about nutrition — that’s a method of control. We don’t want your using this to be easy. We want you cooking your own groceries.

Funnily enough, in a lot of states, there are 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. E.B.T. cards now, they work just like your Visa. But it used to be, and in some cases it still is, that 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 is a social outcome, too.

A tool of humiliation.

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. And they come with this kind of time valence. They come with this financial valence, and then they come with an emotional valence, too.

You have a paragraph in the book where you write:

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.

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 — a part-time job. 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 who I feel is a very good example of this. Do you want to talk through that?

Yeah. Marcella is a single mom of three kids, and she’s a manicurist. She’s low-income. And there’s so much that I admire about her.

She has been handed a lot, and she has worked so hard to make her life better and her kids’ lives better. When I met her, she was going to aesthetician school so that she could perform different services — higher-value services.

When I saw her a couple of weeks ago, she had this nail-tech idea. She’d gone to the University of Utah to ask: What is a copyright and a trademark? Can they help her patent it? She had found an American producer, 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 focuses on self-empowerment. People come to these meetings, they get advice, but they’re really focusing on getting their income up and having help and accountability toward a plan. And it is this enormously, enormously great resource that’s very different from the experience that people often get when they’re walking into a benefit office there.

She also uses public assistance — Medicaid, other programs, SNAP. She was labeled a fraud risk nine years ago.

And she describes this as a paperwork error. She didn’t mean to do it, but she can’t afford a tax person, and she didn’t know how to talk to the state about it, to say: Hey, wait — the nail salon I was working at screwed me over on this.

She paid some restitution to the state. The dollar amount is really low. But ever since then, she has had 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. But the state of Utah has kicked her off one benefit or another more than 120 times — 120 times.

She doesn’t have a lot of choices. She’s got kids to feed in a very literal sense. And it’s like: What is the point here?

But it’s not just a lot of time ——

It is like a part-time job.

You have this scene where she’s being helped by, at least in part, social workers, and they’re just befuddled in front of their computers.

Yeah. It takes hours and hours and hours.

And she doesn’t have a computer, right?

She just got one, but she didn’t have a laptop. She didn’t have Wi-Fi.

She went on, at some point, with me about how hard it was to get a photo on her cellphone and send it as a fax, because she needed to do that.

She asked me: How do I do this thing? And I’m like: Why do you have to send anything as a fax? But you do.

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 despite this. So yes, she gets the help, but it comes with this tremendous cost.

And it’s time she can’t spend working her way out of poverty, being a mother ——

Yeah, with her kids, working, doing anything, right?

Working on her nail business.

And I just always think this is such an underrated — you talk about some of it in the book, and this has been an obsession, at times, in our household: There’s a huge cognitive cost to poverty. That being poor is like being sleepless.

People have looked at it, they have done all kinds of experiments.

It’s the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter.

And it’s just constant thinking about things and the mental weight, and it just makes it harder to pull out.

If the point of the state was to make it easier not to be poor — but these states that believe the way they’re going to do that is by wrapping people in procedure and humiliation — the effect is exactly the opposite.

You need to make it easier for people to move forward in their life, not harder. If you’re poor, it’s [expletive] hard enough.

Right. The ordeal mechanism theory is an idea that comes out in the 1980s — that basically, for government programs, you want to make them a bit of an ordeal.

What that is going to do is that is going to get people who don’t really need the benefit to not get it. It’s going to discourage them. And it’s also going to help you protect against fraud. It’s going to 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 have to work for these things. You shouldn’t just get them.

And in fact, you needed to have all of these little strictures and these rules in order to build the mass public’s trust.

But this didn’t always totally make sense to me, because it’s not like people liked welfare better after 1996. Nobody is like: Oh, that’s a really great program today.

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

What happened in 1996?

Archival clip of Bill Clinton: Today we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope today will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began.

Archival clip of Bill Clinton: Today we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope today will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began.

In 1996, the program was 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. If you have one kid and then you have a kid 10 years later, you’re not going to get Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

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 billion per year — so tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.

Archival clip of Clinton: 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 a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be — a second chance, not a way of life.

Archival clip of Clinton: 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 a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be — a second chance, not a way of life.

For the people who are receiving the money, they have to do so much work to get this really paltry benefit. 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: Let’s say that you were a teenage parent and you weren’t married to the father of your children. The 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 reasonable, right? Like, maybe that helps the noncustodial 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 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, to some state administrator. 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 have a fine theory behind them — leads to, in some cases, depending on the state, half of the people who get sanctioned by the program being sanctioned for that one policy alone. Which is this punitive “You’re not complying with the rules, we’re going to claw your benefits back” approach.

And TANF now is so ineffective that it does not actually change the child poverty rate. It has no effect on it. 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.

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, and the programs where the government treats people intuitively — or by default — with suspicion. They have to prove themselves worthy.

And I think it’s useful to jump back and forth a little bit between them. The postal service is an amazing example here of a program, a government operation where they decided: Everybody is worthy of getting their mail delivered, no matter where they live.

You talk about an art project, I guess, by Steven Brower at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. Can you just talk about that and talk about the post office as a kind of counterexample here?

Yes, absolutely. So he had these art students, and he asked them to send him a letter.

So these students, they drew maps, they made pictures, they wrote things in unusual typefaces and fashions — I mean, they’re art students.

And basically, all of the mail got to him because the postal workers figured it out. They looked at the map, and they were like: OK, we’ll take it. It has a stamp on it, we’re going to try. Or they were shading and occluding and trying to figure out the addresses.

And I think that the postal service has this service orientation. It is, in so many ways, the most amazing service in American life. They operate everywhere. You don’t have to register your address. They deliver mail by skiff in some cases. They deliver mail by mule to the base of the Grand Canyon.

Really? Who lives at the base of the Grand Canyon and has a P.O. box?

There’s a hotel there, and there’s a Native American reservation, I believe, there. There are people down there.

They make a good-faith effort to get mail to everyone.

So this gets to deservingness: We’ve decided you’re deserving of getting your mail delivered, even if you live somewhere tricky ——

Everybody is — there’s no question.

Medicare — you turn 65 ——

It happens relatively easily.

We were talking about this, among the team, as we were preparing for this, and somebody was saying: Well, that’s easy because it’s just when people are getting to retirement age.

But no — Social Security, 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 a lack of administrative complexity in figuring out who it is, or is it something else?

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 saving your money and giving it back to you. That, I think, is a pleasant fiction. That’s not how it works.

Regardless, there’s this idea that, yeah, if you don’t earn Social Security, you’re not going to get Social Security.

There are 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’ve talked a bit about the research on this, of what happens when you interface with — or depend on — programs that humiliate you, that make you jump through a lot of hoops. What happens?

The work that I like on this, one of the great pieces on this — and there’s a lot in political science, and there is a lot in sociology — is this work by Joe Soss at the University of Minnesota.

He looks at moms who are on cash welfare, and he compares them to moms who are similarly situated in income terms but aren’t getting the program. And he finds that welfare makes people withdraw. It makes them less civic, less likely to vote.

They develop this adversarial relationship with the........

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