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.
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.
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.
Yeah, exactly.
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.
Yes.
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.
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.
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 ——
That’s it.
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.
[Laughs.] Yes.
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 state. They see the state as being a source of aid and help — but also a tremendous threat to them and their children personally.
And the government, through programs like this, is imparting a sense of political worth to people. 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.
One of the parts of the book I found very moving is in the latter half. You tell these two stories. One of the people works for a boutique real estate agency, and she gets a bad head injury. She ends up in what you describe as a paperwork vortex with the state. But she and her family react to that as an injustice.
Yes.
I don’t know what their income background is, but clearly they’re not used to being treated this way by the state.
She’s college educated. Her siblings are college educated.
And you compare it with 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 working-class voters are often less trusting of the government. They vote more Republican now, and they think there’s just a strange, false consciousness there — or it’s all cultural issues. But oftentimes, working-class voters have had terrible experiences with the government.
Awful.
And I think that’s actually quite underplayed in why sometimes they are not as enthusiastic about liberal or leftist government programs as one would think.
If you’ve had good experiences with the government, you think: Oh, redistribution, it’s going to be great for everybody. But then if you’ve been on the business end of redistribution, sometimes it has maybe been really humiliating and time-consuming for you.
Absolutely. This is one of the complications, I think, to the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” theory.
Which is that these are voters voting against self-interest for cultural reasons ——
Yes, that they’re voting against their own self-interest.
The people who are middle class, who are college educated whom I’ve spoken with — and there are many — who have the bumpy fall down the income ladder and then have to interact with the government as a supplicant who is there begging for help — they 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. You’re not getting the “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: 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.
I want to get to the parts that rich people do interact with in a second.
But I’d 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 it’s a way of illustrating what we’re actually describing.
You said you did — what is it?
The D.H.S.-1171.
Oh, of course. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] There is a guy named Michael Brennan who used to run one of the United Ways in Michigan and who now runs a firm that helps the government and other agencies redesign enrollment processes and things like that around people — human-centered design.
And he, for years, carried around the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Form 1171 in his pocket, like a little miniature version of it.
You meet the most interesting people. [Laughs.]
I do. I’m an extrovert — I’ll yap with anybody.
But he reminded me of a priest carrying the Bible, or a lot of politicians who 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.
A thousand questions?
A thousand 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.
So Michael Brennan and his organization, Civilla, helped to redesign it. But until recently, this was the form, and I have it if we want to look at it.
Love a prop.
[Laughs.] So this is on two-sided paper, so it’s actually kind of smaller than it ——
This is heavy, by the way. [Laughs.]
Yeah, it is heavy.
Surprisingly heavy.
And it’s really hard — you can look at it — it’s hard to read. It’s like: Do I have to do all of this?
Oh, my God.
So look at the ——
I’ve not seen this form before.
It’s terrible.
This is a lot of boxes ——
If this person is under 22, complete this section. Who paid for this child’s birth expenses? State, parents, another person? What was the 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? The conception date?
Where your kid was conceived — doctors don’t ask you that. This is the state telling poor people to go [expletive] themselves. That’s what that is. I cannot imagine how upsetting it must be to already be in a state of risk or distress ——
And you’re going to the state for help. Like, it’s already difficult.
You are asking for help, and they’re like: Oh, where and what day was your kid conceived?
What day was your kid conceived? I don’t know what day our kids were conceived.
Nobody does. That’s not a thing.
What is the state telling you when it asks you that?
Also, if you go through this form, it’s very intimidating.
It’s hard to read.
It’s hard to read.
It’s enormous.
It tells you a lot, that if you — like, I’m just looking at the front. 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: 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 an exquisite sense of what the time tax can do. This is 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 going to 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.
And that it, in this telling — not my view — acts as a virtuous disincentive to people going on the public dole.
I think it is all of the above. Oftentimes, I think that these documents happen by accretion. There are some state laws, there are some federal laws. They ask that you figure this out.
Some of it is 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 law degrees and are talking to lobbyists and are wearing suits. And it is constructed to meet the state’s needs of: OK, what do we feel we need from these people? What are the legal requirements? What, given our processes, do we need?
This is not a form that is constructed with people in mind — the end user, the citizen, the person who’s actually at risk.
But 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 here?
No, I think it’s all of the above. And I think that we have a great example of this in House Resolution 1, which is currently rolling out, which is applying a nationwide work requirement in the Medicaid program.
This is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
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?
Yeah, it extends them in SNAP — SNAP already has work requirements.
Which is food stamps.
Yes, food stamps.
The nonmodern name for it.
And so there are 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 to stop for a second: Medicaid is not a cash benefit. You can’t do anything with Medicaid except get health care. So the idea that you would get Medicaid, and you would stop working or would just be living on the dole is silly.
But for the first time ever, it is applying a nationwide work requirement to nondisabled adults in the Medicaid program. That is 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.
I want to stop here, both because it’s a good example and because it’s a really massive policy change about to go into effect.
Yes, huge.
You try to think about this — it’s like, what is Medicaid for? We think people should be able to have health care even if they’re poor.
So now you imagine a person who is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid ——
Yeah, and you have to be really poor — 138 percent of the federal poverty line, which is really low.
And either cannot find a job or cannot get it together in a way where they can work their way through the paperwork and continuously prove that they’re looking for a job in the right ways.
Different states are going to implement this, and places will implement this in different ways with different levels of difficulty for the people they are testing.
What about society is improved if that person now has no coverage when they have a heart attack?
Beats me, and they’re going to go to the E.R., and it’s going to be uncompensated care that somebody will pay for — just not Washington.
Will the individual pay because they’re not going to get treated for that health condition they have?
I think about this all the time. I’m a Type 1 diabetic. No insulin, I’m dead — in a couple 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.
Or they can only get a part-time job or whatever. They have caretaking responsibilities.
These are not generally people who are just sitting at home, not working.
And they’re not people who have other health insurance options for the most part.
No.
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 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 all the way through, but it was telling that this was done to get savings so that richer people can get tax cuts.
Yes, absolutely. And there was this tremendous — Donald Trump promised that he wasn’t cutting Medicaid. That this is going to be easy to comply with, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to get people — they kept citing young men who aren’t working to get Medicaid: We’re going to get them to work.
Who are also the cheapest people to insure, by the way.
Yeah. They don’t really use a lot of health care, 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 are 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 [expletive], 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 E.R. Because oftentimes, if you are a younger person, you’re managing this, that and the other — 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 going to get $1 trillion from the program without cutting?
I would also note that the predominant recipients of government benefits — they’re always saying it’s about the young guys who don’t want to work. But there are 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. 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 isn’t honest.
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 is the best way to help them. That is often what they are seeking. That is the care that they get.
They’re all going to lose their insurance because they’re not going to 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?
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 works with symbolic information very smoothly, that has a lot of executive function, that wakes up in the morning and does morning pages and writes out a task list.
By the end of the night — you’re laughing at me because? [Laughs.]
You’re describing yourself. [Laughs.]
I hew to a task list, it’s true.
The great irony is that I’ve married somebody who’s good at this stuff, because: Do I have a driver’s license? Do I know where it is? Nope.
Yes, to the first. And no, to the second.
Yeah, I think it exists somewhere in time and space. I’ve literally talked to my therapist on the phone, and we have opened the mail together.
Good insight there. [Laughs.]
If you don’t have that, if — for all kinds of reasons people have addiction issues. 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.
That makes it hard to do the things that society rewards you for — things that come very naturally to other people.
We pretend that people are all successful because they either worked hard or they didn’t, and everybody knows it’s [expletive]. The things also that help you work hard and that make you a compulsive worker, you often don’t choose those, either.
So you take somebody who is already struggling with this, and maybe that is part of why they are poor. Because 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 on forms you have to fill out — forms that routinely I get in late or that you get in late.
To go back to one thing you were saying before — yes, I think that high-income people often have a completely different orientation toward this kind of paperwork.
I really like the philosopher Bernard Suits’s idea of having a lusory attitude. The lusory attitude is what makes a game a game — arbitrary rules and this idea of: OK, I’m going to try to win.
And this is the attitude that many high-income people bring to, for instance, a college application. Yale is going to make you spend 100 hours on the application. You’re like: Oh, that’s another place where I can achieve.
So this is a meritocratic idea of: The harder you work, the better a boy you are.
Or if you have high-priced accountants, high-priced tax preparers ——
Ooh, they love that.
It’s a game you’re trying to win.
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 kind of get off on it.
It’s a hobby.
Yeah, exactly. And I think that we can both take this sort of — actually, it’s not Puritan, it’s an Elizabethan idea: There’s deserving and undeserving, and we’re going to separate these two.
I think, importantly, in the United States, this has to get filtered through the prism of race. The reason that we do not have these universally accessible, simple benefits is anti-Black racism. A lot of these big programs were set up during Jim Crow. I know that this sounds overly declarative, but I don’t think it’s wrong.
You brought up deserving or 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, that believe in TANF, that believe in all kinds of tax credits and Hand Up and all the rest of it, is twofold.
One, fraud is a real problem. And two, that even just politically, if you believe in these programs — if they develop a reputation for helping people for whom that help is not deserved, the program will be destroyed. This is functionally what happens to welfare.
Yes.
We have TANF because the view was — and this was racialized, and this was wrong in many cases, but it wasn’t wrong in literally every case — that welfare reform was helping people that Middle America didn’t think should be helped. And that got strong enough that a Democrat was the one who ended up gutting it.
So what about the arguments that actual policymakers make for doing things this way?
I think it’s important when you’re thinking about the shift from Aid to Families With Dependent Children to TANF. So this is what happens in 1996.
Old welfare to ——
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. This is true for a lot of public programs, actually — housing vouchers, that kind of thing. You can meet all the criteria, and you might not get it.
Which is crazy to high-income people, I think, where it’s almost always: You meet the criteria, you’re going to get it.
Yeah, if you have a mortgage, you get the mortgage interest deduction.
Yeah, they’re not shuffling around who gets it and who doesn’t.
But if you’re eligible for Section 8 vouchers, you may not get much.
Yeah, you might not. Or you might wait 10 years, 12 years. And it might not be obvious to you why some people are getting it, and some aren’t. It’s often not entirely obvious to the people within those organizations, either, I would note.
But yes, the shift from A.F.D.C. to TANF is driven not wholly, but at least strongly, by racial concerns — not fraud concerns. Those come together. These are two sides of the same coin.
The originator — the program that comes way earlier — is this Mothers’ Pension program, which is run at the state level. It’s used almost exclusively by white women.
In that program, if you were a good widow or a woman who had been abandoned, and you had kids, you would have a social worker come. It was very paternalistic, but it was supposed to be wages for being a mother and doing the most important work in American life. This is an old, Progressive Era policy.
But then, when you get Aid to Dependent Children, which then becomes A.F.D.C. — this is a complicated part of Social Security. Because it’s an entitlement, and because Black women are more likely to be low wage, when they have kids, they use the program.
And the entire program becomes about the media conception of the program, whenever they show images.
There’s a really great study by the political scientist Martin Gilens demonstrating 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 were never, and they still aren’t — it’s images of these Black families in urban areas.
And that is partially — along with concerns about the rising cost and everything else — what leads to this backlash. You can actually trace the way that politicians are talking about it. They stop talking about kids. They start talking about moms, and they start saying: Well, these moms need to be working. And: Well, welfare is a work program.
And it transforms, and that leads to 1996, which then leads us here. So I would just note that I think that when you are thinking about fraud, it’s really important to think about the racial diversity in this country and the way that has changed the way that we set up our public programs.
The second thing is that there would be way less fraud if the programs were simpler and easier.
If you have fewer rules, and the government does more work to determine: Oh, OK, 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 fussy, finicky things — there would be fewer people getting overpayments, underpayments, inappropriate payments.
I would note that we do not have a great sense of how much fraud there is in these programs. We have an improper payment error rate, which is when they go back, and they look at: Did you get too much? Did you get too little?
A lot of it is driven by the complexity of the program itself and the fact that the government is not doing the work. It’s these people who are pulling together forms, or filling this out 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.
Fraud is real, and whose fraud we choose to care about is telling.
Who does a lot of the Medicaid and Medicare fraud? Doctors. [Laughs.]
Or the heads of large organizations like Rick Scott, a senator from Florida, who ran — I believe it was a for-profit hospital organization that had one of the largest fraud settlements with Medicare in history.
Separately, Donald Trump ——
You’ve got to be real fancy to do a big Medicare fraud.
Donald Trump pardoned — or commuted, I don’t remember, but did one of the two — somebody who had settled one of the largest fraud cases with Medicare more recently.
You do have real fraud on the part of individuals. On the other hand, Trump and the Republicans gutting the Internal Revenue Service’s audit division has made fraud a lot easier for high-income taxpayers. They are not going after Medicare and Medicaid fraud in the way they could.
The biggest frauds come from organized actors, both legitimate and illegitimate, who are able to do complex frauds that are not about putting the wrong name down on a form.
Yeah, it’s unbundling services. It’s complicated. You’ve got to ——
It’s buying fake or leaked information online and using that to apply for unemployment insurance.
It’s criminal groups.
I mean, in Minnesota — the smaller ring frauds, which are real — that was organizational.
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 urine tests, how many people would get their benefits revoked for that, I wonder?
If you had to do this form instead of ticking a single box, that actually your accountant is doing because you don’t do your own taxes?
Well, this goes to maybe the time tax, and also a good place to see the choices we’re making. In America, the system the most people interact with is the tax system itself.
So this is part of the book: How does our tax system work from this perspective, and how could it?
Oh my gosh. In Japan, for the most part, if you’re earning a salary, you don’t ever have to do your taxes. The Japanese tax authority just does it for you.
In a number of European countries — I forget whether it’s Sweden or Finland — you can do it by text message. Norway? Sorry to the Nordics. I apologize.
Do they all look the same to you, Annie? [Laughs.]
I’m just — I can’t remember which one. I’m so sorry. [Laughs.] 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 make any changes. And then maybe you sign it, you send it back. It is risible.
You know when Europeans are like: Wait, your health care system works how? You got billed for what?
You know when you ask a European: Oh, how much did you have to pay to get that baby? And everyone’s like: Pardon?
Similarly, I think if people understood that the I.R.S. — I’m not saying they’re not a competent and professional agency at doing what they’re doing. In fact, I know a lot of civil servants at the I.R.S. who are champing at the bit to be able to do people’s taxes for them. They’re not allowed to.
Well, here’s the crazy thing about this, because I think it’s worth getting at the mechanism here. The I.R.S. has all the information ——
They do.
So the reason the I.R.S. can come after you to fill out your taxes and say you underpaid is because they know how much you’re supposed to pay.
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: OK, great. And then you pay it.
We even had a pilot program of letting the I.R.S. tell you how much you’re supposed to pay in Direct File, and Trump just killed it.
And people liked it.
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Direct File — it was great.
There are two things here. So one is that the U.S. tax system is so complex. There are so many write-offs and arcane, fussy, little provisions that do require people to tell the I.R.S.
But for most people, that’s not true. Most Americans take the standard deduction, which means that you’re not itemizing things. It’s nine in 10 people who take the standard deduction.
The second is that there are legal prohibitions on data sharing between U.S. government agencies. So Health and Human Services might have some information on you, but they can’t send it to the I.R.S. 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?
However, you can always give people the option. Make it a permission: I want the government to fill out 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 I.R.S.
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.
So I want to stop here, because one of the moments in the book where you said something that just stopped me a little cold was when you went to Estonia.
I remember when you went to Estonia.
So good.
You didn’t tell me much about that trip, so I read about it in your book. [Laughs.] And you talked about Estonia’s only-once policy.
Oh, yeah.
This was so utopic that it was almost hard to read about it.
What is the Estonia only-once policy?
So Estonia created a government de novo not that long ago.
Post-Soviet.
Yeah. They got their independence back, and it was all really young people — not that this is the most important thing, but I do think it’s interesting in the history. The people who were putting the government together were often in their 20s and 30s. A lot of them are just barely retirement age now. They were extremely poor. They were financially distressed. They needed foreign investment, and they need the support of institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
After the Soviet experience, they wanted to have a government that people trust and believe in. And they ended up putting together the most technologically advanced government, I think, perhaps on Earth.
Almost certainly. At least in terms of service delivery.
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 if you tell your kid’s school: Here’s our new address — it just updates it with every other agency.
And they have this unified system of benefits where you can go online and see your voting record, your property records, access your medical records.
And I was sitting with a woman who was showing me this, and I was like: I don’t even know how I would get all of — you know, your educational records. I was like: Does the government have any idea of the public school where I went to elementary school? How would you even know?
And so, yeah, going back to the I.R.S., there is a challenge. But again, they don’t want to meet it. They want you to have to do your own taxes.
And so, this costs Americans billions of hours a year.
But it’s not the I.R.S. that wants you to do your own taxes.
No, it’s not the I.R.S.
It is Republicans.
It’s Congress.
It’s not Congress. It’s Republicans.
Yeah.
Because Republicans, forever, have wanted taxes to be hard so you hate the government. And it’s not just because they’re in the pocket of big tax preparer. Although they are a little bit in the pocket of big tax preparer.
They 100 percent are.
Intuit and others have done a lot of lobbying on this.
Yeah, these companies lobby so heavily.
It’s a big industry.
So heavily.
But if every time you meet the government it is smooth and seamless, and you walk away thinking: That government is pretty great — then you’re going to want more government.
Totally.
And Republicans don’t want you to want more government. And so it creates this kind of ——
But don’t they, though? Like, they want government for some people. There’s a whole thing about Donald Trump.
But they don’t want efficient government. Although I will say about DOGE — one of the things I remember thinking about with DOGE, and you and I talking about, is the number of times when I would ——
I’m going to walk out of here.
[Laughs.] 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 can’t do the obvious thing because the I.R.S. won’t share any data.
Yes.
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 wasn’t a firewall. And I’m not saying what Elon Musk and DOGE did was legal. It was probably not legal — but it turned out to be doable.
Look, one way or another, guess who gets to change laws? Congress. [Laughs.]
You can make things work better, and I think we have taken too much of how the government works as settled and unchangeable, and it’s not.
DOGE was running through walls destructively, but one thing they really showed was a lot of things that, say, the Obama or Biden administrations treated as sacrosanct — those were guidelines. Those were recommendations from your lawyers.
And maybe it’s worth it to start breaking some guidelines and rewriting rules in order to make the government work better.
There’s a deeper issue here, which is that Congress does not see itself as the administrator of anything.
You know my view is: Congress should get rid of the filibuster, and then when Democrats are in power, 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 them, they can be re-elected, and that’s how democracy is supposed to work.
Instead of: We can’t do anything, and we would like you to study congressional procedure to understand why.
“Let’s have a parliament” on the bumper sticker here. [Laughs.]
Like, take away presidential power and think of a prime minister. It’s going to be really popular.
The Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish the Senate. This is the moderate position now.
Yeah.
The thing you’re really debating in this book, pretty explicitly, is the federalization of powers.
You do not like how many programs are state administered. You definitely don’t like it when it goes down to the county level.
You’re arguing for a simpler but bigger and more national government.
Yes. Things should be federalized.
What do you want to federalize?
Oh, my goodness. So there are some constitutional issues here. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not going to get into them.
Yes, Medicaid: Federalize it. Unemployment insurance: Federalize it. TANF: If you’re going to have it, federalize it.
Any program — my bumper sticker is: I hate laboratories of democracy. The federal government is better at doing this. They are.
Why?
For a few reasons. One, they don’t have balanced budget requirements.
This is actually a really big thing — states and cities do.
The second is just a simple “How many agencies are we going to have doing the same work?” type of question. There are 56 Medicaid programs.
Yeah, what happens when you move?
Yes. It’s a constant — it happens all of the time.
And if you’re housing insecure, you move a lot.
Yeah, totally. And I think that there is a floor that so many state and local programs sink below. 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.
They’re also often so highly proceduralized throughout government that they’re less effective.
Oh, my God. Absolutely.
You often have more generous benefits in a much more complex bureaucracy.
Yeah, absolutely.
California is a nightmare on a lot of this. They’ve gotten better on some fronts, but it’s not 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.
Your first book was about universal basic income. And when I got to the end of this one, I came to think these books were more connected than I had thought when you were writing it.
Oh, totally. They’re twins.
[Both laugh.]
It seems to me that you were moving toward something that’s more like: The government should do fewer things but do them clearly and well.
This seemed to me, in the anti-poverty dimension, like it was sort of an argument for a negative income tax. Not quite a U.B.I., where Bill Gates gets it, but something where, if you’re below a level, you just get it. We don’t test you. We don’t put you through hoops. We just say: There’s a level in this country people do not need to fall beneath.
The conservative argument over the years for something like U.B.I., or negative income taxes, which Richard Nixon pushed at one moment ——
Archival clip of Richard Nixon: 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.
Excellent president up until [Laughs] ——
The government should do fewer things but do them better.
He had some problems. Cambodia, I’m not a huge fan of.
Yeah — no, no, no. I’m not here to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. There are a lot of things to be concerned about there.
But a fascinating figure.
Indeed.
That seems like the kind of thing you’re envisioning here.
Yeah. Look at the child tax credit.
There’s this brief moment during the pandemic where they give a really big C.T.C. And it reaches more than 80 percent of target families. The I.R.S. 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.
So the problem, I think, with running so many programs through the tax code, where it really is much more efficient — and the I.R.S. has become a crucial welfare benefits administrator, even though it doesn’t like to think of itself that way — both the I.R.S. and Congress, I guess — is that then people don’t notice.
There’s amazing research by Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University 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 their accountant is figuring it out. I think that they might not conceive of it that way because we are not beating somebody over the head with: Hey, you got a home mortgage interest deduction, for which you didn’t have to pee in a cup.
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 downside to tax programs, which is that 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 you want to get them.
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.
Absolutely.
I remember there’s this whole story from the Biden era, where Biden says: I’m not going to put my big signature or face on a check like Donald Trump.
It’s like: You should have put your big signature and giant face on the check like Donald Trump.
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.
Oh, totally.
So ending in a stirring call for bigger government, more government, is fundamentally paradoxical. Government should just do less and be more out of people’s lives and not take and waste so much of their money and their time.
Do they want to take away Social Security?
Some of them do. [Laughs.]
Oh, gosh. [Laughs.]
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 they pay for works. In the way that the governments around the world work.
We have low standards. We’re letting these [expletive] 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. When you’re creating a partially refundable tax credit — or something that is means tested — there is no way to say: Hey, that is stupid. You shouldn’t do that. Nobody is going to use that. Who needs that fuss?
And I think that we should say: Hey, we’re paying you to do this. You take $7 trillion a year. Be competent.
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.
Totally. And again, the civil servants often really want these programs to work. They’re experts on these programs. And we don’t listen to them, either.
They aren’t people who are stakeholders. It’s not like you have them coming forward and saying: I think that we could make these really good changes, and that would result in — 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?
You’re not allowed to speak out. You’d get fired.
You can’t go write an Op-Ed. I mean, I know through you how many people you talk to in the bureaucracy who are just hair on fire, funneling you information about how it doesn’t work.
Oh, my gosh.
But nobody wants to make government programs work better more than the people who are held back from administering them correctly.
Yes. It drives them crazy.
If you’ve devoted your life to getting people SNAP, and now you are not able to get people SNAP, it drives you crazy.
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.
Jennifer Pahlka, I think, has the greatest exegesis of this idea in “Recoding America.”
Author of “Recoding America.”
Yeah. Guest of the podcast.
Past guest of the show.
Right. Where she describes it as this bureaucratic anxiety cycle.
So what happens is: Congress spends some money, they have some program, the program doesn’t work well. So they put more rules on the bureaucrats, who become, then, less capable of actually administering the program. They get called in before Congress.
So you just end up in this doom loop of Congress telling these bureaucrats: OK, 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.
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 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 try to pass, in fact, a constitutional amendment on money.
And they need to make them faster. “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 it. They tend to mean saving money when they talk about government efficiency.
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.
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. If that was a way to win votes, and if people wanted that, why doesn’t it happen?
Because the time tax 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 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 look at some politicians who have tackled this, and it’s pretty popular when you can actually do it.
Zohran Mamdani, in New York, has had this idea: If you’re a small business, it shouldn’t take you a million pieces of paper and all this time to just get a very basic business license. That’s great and almost like Republican politics.
Could that politics work for people? I think so.
I think it will 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 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.
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 sour entire communities on the government, because they’re like: Wait, why are you treating us like this?
And I would want to see more research on this. I’m really interested. But it makes sense to me: Do people like a government that treats people this way?
I’ve wondered whether or not the Trump Medicaid and SNAP work requirements are going to create an opening.
When Republicans cut government sharply, they often then create the conditions for a politics 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, or they fear the cuts, and all of a sudden, they recognize what they are losing or might lose, and it creates focus, and it creates the possibility to do something.
Now they’ve decided to do a massive cut that’s going to hit many of their voters. Many Trump voters are on Medicaid or on SNAP. It’s going to hit them in very unpleasant, complicated ways, and I think give the opposition an opportunity to make this kind of burden an issue.
To not just argue for expansion or restoration of funding but to say: 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.
Totally. I think 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 percent, which around 40 states have — again, not a fraud rate but an improper payments rate. 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. 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 likes of which we have never seen.
The 1996 TANF reform — that was so tiny in comparison to this.
Much smaller program.
This is almost 25 million people — 25 million. That’s getting close to one in 10 Americans. 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.
And for most Americans, you could never have to fill out a tax form or pay an accountant for that again.
Can you imagine how nice that would be? It would be really nice.
I cannot.
I think that’s a good place to end — a little moment of imagining nice things.
Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
So while I was thinking of the books to recommend to the audience, you and I had created this list of books that we mention 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 was a prominent British spy. And he almost becomes the head of MI6. He’s a Soviet agent. And he eventually defects to the Soviet Union and drinks himself to death in Moscow.
I think that there was perhaps some expectation of 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 he grew up with, the people he worked right next to — sending them home in body bags to their widows.
And so many books have been written about this guy. Ben Macintyre’s books come up in this. Philby is a figure in some of the novels of Graham Greene because they actually knew each other, because Graham Greene was a spy.
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.
But Philby writes this book that is — I kept on waiting for him to say: Is he actually a Communist or a socialist? 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 the same skepticism. [Laughs.] But that’s one of my books, which I think many of your readers would like.
The second is the book that I consider ——
Annie really mentions this book a lot. She’s not lying about this. Kim Philby comes up constantly.
World historical piece of [expletive]. What a world historical piece of [expletive] Kim Philby is.
The second is a book that I consider most insightful about politics and political thinking. Neither of us are sports watchers, but it is a book about sports.
It is about the University of North Carolina and Duke University, and it’s called “To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever” by Will Blythe. I bring this up constantly. And it is about this famous football — just kidding — rivalry. [Laughs.] Sorry.
It’s basketball.
It’s about the offsides rule.
And yes, it’s about basketball, sorry. It’s really, really beautifully written. But this book is about how habits, how acting this rivalry out, inculcates the rivalrous mind-set that’s all occurring within people who live within 12 miles of each other. That’s one of the fun parts about it.
And then my third hobbyhorse book — which I think people talk about all the time, but I feel like a lot of people have never actually read — is “Gender Trouble” by Judith Butler.
It will blow your hair back. I’m a huge listener of manosphere podcasts, along with yours. 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 an original point of mine. But he has such a fascinating conception of masculinity, and it’s enacted in such a wonderfully camp way.
This is such a take. [Laughs.]
This is obvious.
I’m not saying it’s wrong.
I’m sorry. This is table stakes.
Have me on, Joe Rogan. I’d love to talk about paperwork with you.
Paperwork and your performance of gender.
Yeah.
I would watch that episode of “Rogan.”
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 interesting is there’s this idea of manly men — with the testosterone.
And one of the points made in this book is that you learn what gender is by enacting gender, and by this iterative process of emulation, of putting on the muscle T-shirt and ——
These books are kind of all the same book, in a way.
These are all the same book.
You don’t think your way into actions, you act your way into thoughts.
Exactly. These are all the same book in very different ways. In very, very different ways.
Annie Lowrey, thank you very much.
Thank you.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota, Johnny Simon and Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee, Dani Dillon and Julian Hackney. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post This Is Why People Hate the Government appeared first on New York Times.
