The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It

by Annie Lowrey

A powerful investigation into American bureaucracy, how it wastes our time and drives inequality, and what we can do to make paperwork work for us

Everyone knows that dealing with government bureaucracy can be a nightmare. Doing your taxes is bad enough, but for those applying for financial aid, housing assistance, unemployment, disability, or Medicaid, it’s worse—and the stakes are infinitely higher. If time is money, the hoops we must jump through to access government services or comply with the law are just one more bill we as citizens are forced to pay.

Journalist Annie Lowrey has termed this the “time tax”: the paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens to access their rights and benefits. So how did the world’s wealthiest country end up with such a convoluted, punitive, and inept system of public admin­istration? Lowrey traces the pathbreaking history of administrative burdens in the United States from the Civil War to today, revealing how they were historically built as a tool of discrimination. She examines the effect of time taxes on civic life in the US, from how they amplify inequality and entrench poverty to how they reduce trust in the government.

Lowrey not only diagnoses the problem and gives this miserable experience of interacting with our government a name; she also shows that it doesn’t have to be this way. Countries from Estonia to Vietnam have made it a priority to reduce administrative burdens for their citizens, and she argues there’s no reason we can’t do the same. The Time Tax will enrage you, enlighten you, and, most important, provide a point-by-point guide for reclaiming our precious time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Audiobook, Government, Economics, Political Science

Audible Audio

Published August 25, 2026

About the author

Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor for The Atlantic. A former writer for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and Slate, among other publications, she is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. Lowrey lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews

[Ron Charles]

Babies always sweep away the carefully laid plans of their parents. But our first child almost swept us away, too.

In the summer of 1989, Elissa was born with cerebral palsy.

I was working as an instructor at a small college where I made $24,000 a year. Because my health insurance didn’t cover my wife or any children, we had carefully saved up enough money to pay for prenatal appointments and the birth.

But we hadn’t counted on 10 days in the neonatal intensive care unit at more than $2,000 a day.

When we finally drove away from the hospital — so carefully, so slowly, so determined that nothing else would befall us — we headed into a life we could not fathom.

We also wandered into a bewildering maze of government paperwork.

Admittedly, we were exhausted and frightened, but isn’t everyone who turns in desperation to public aid?

As Dawn and I pawed our way through one byzantine form after another, we wondered, How does anybody ever figure all this out? What if we didn’t have college degrees or didn’t speak English? What if we had to work full time? What if we were sick?

Why — we screamed to the heavens — is this so damn time-consuming?

It’s taken me more than 35 years, but I’ve finally found the answer. It’s laid out in a new book by Annie Lowrey called The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.

Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic, examines “the levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on citizens in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs.”

The problem is not news to anyone who does their own taxes, tries to get a building permit, or applies for food stamps.

“Enrollment forms are written in impenetrable High Bureaucratese and are loaded up with fine print,” Lowrey writes. “Processes are arcane, timelines long, and outcomes uncertain… Such burdens are like kudzu, choking off the fruits and flowers of our commons.”

Americans spend some 12 billion hours a year filling out various government forms, which comes to about six mind-numbing workdays per person. We lose five times as much time dealing with government paperwork as folks in....

Read the rest of this review for free on Substack:
https://roncharles.substack.com/p/sto...

[Tom Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Annie Lowrey has written a thoughtful and well-researched policy book whose central concept reorganizes how you’ll view every interaction with government (local, state, and federal). The "time tax" is the hidden levy government extracts not in dollars but in hours, days, and months: the forms, the hold music, the appeals, document-gathering, the maze you navigate to claim benefits you rightfully qualify for. Her insight that this burden is regressive, that the less you have the more of it you pay and she documents it with rigor. The poorest Americans spend 73 more hours a year waiting than affluent ones. Adding a work requirement to Arkansas's Medicaid stripped coverage from one in four adults without moving the needle on employment, and each "appropriate" disenrollment cost taxpayers roughly what covering the person would have. The reporting is precise, and the case studies, from HealthCare.gov's collapse to Lowrey's own two-month ordeal over a single disability form, are devastating.

Where the book is strongest, it is also nonpartisan. Her account of occupational licensing (one in twenty workers needed a credential in the 1950s; one in four do now), of outsourcing that costs more than in-house work would, and of fraud-prevention regimes that spend more hunting phantom cheats than they save, should resonate with readers across the political spectrum. Her central analytic framing, distinguishing "operational" agencies that simply deliver from "procedural" ones that interrogate, is clarifying.

The trouble is her cure. Lowrey's diagnosis is that conditionality breeds bureaucracy, and the logical fix could run two ways: strip the conditions or expand the state to absorb them. She leans heavily toward the second. Unemployment insurance, Medicaid, WIC and SNAP should become "big, singular, federal programs." Washington should hire more public workers, she argues, noting the U.S., per capita, employs about half as many people as peer nations. Lowrey’s fix is almost always to make a program bigger rather than simply less conditional. These may be defensible aims, but they are a different project from reducing administrative burden, and the book repeatedly treats them as identical. A reader can embrace automatic tax filing, one-stop enrollment, and the end of cost-ineffective work requirements without signing on to a larger federal footprint.

The explosion in required occupational licenses, the waste of means-testing, and the failures of outsourcing all point toward a simpler, less conditional state, not necessarily a bigger one. The two programs she most admires, Social Security and the Postal Service, are beloved precisely because they ask little and promise much. You don’t need to federalize Medicaid to apply that lesson. Lowrey proves that the time tax is real, regressive, and largely a choice. She is less convincing that the only way to stop choosing it is more government.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the advanced copy of this book. The views represented here are mine and mine alone. Other than a free copy of the book, I was not compensated for this review.

[Rhea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thorough, well researched, and made me sufficiently mad at government. I found the recommendations and consideration of counter arguments to be somewhat lacking.

[Kate Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Repetitive of other books I’ve read on this topic and doesn’t add much to the topic quantitatively. Also very one sided and doesn’t acknowledge counterarguments and address them

[Jacob · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

A bleak book, but gave me a lot to chew on.

Lowrey knows her stuff, and she can off throw these flashbangs of facts towards the reader as if there is no tomorrow. Yes, Ms. Lowrey, the government is incompetent, no one likes it, and many are checked out, leading to the government continuing to be incompetent.

Her overall idea of improving the system is a complete overhaul of the federalist system. She makes the statement that the social safety net is not really a net, more so bloated, complex layers that often stymie any form of help by making the individual do it themselves, hence the need for more centralized efforts. The reason why we give responsibilities to the state is to account for the failings of Washington.

It is also true that our states are wildly unequal. A state like Michigan has standards that are night and day different when compared to Louisiana.

True, most issues that have top-down solutions tend to flounder due to not accounting for the people at the bottom, but it seems as though the main goal is to fix the time tax from the top down. And yeah, D.C., has a lot of work to do in order to modernize and simplify everything, which is why all the states should strive for this, too. It's hard for the federal government to mandate change to the states when they themselves fail to do the same thing.

Due to the timesuck of American life, of course its tempting to get extreme. In this view, we have tried moderation, and moderation has led us here.

Anyway, its a good book, it just leads me to thinking and falling down more rabbitholes. By the way, Lowrey provides many other books and homework to read. I liked that.

[D.M. · Rating 3.25 out of 5]

This book is designed to drive you crazy. And it succeeded in delivering its design. It is long past time that we recognize that means testing is too often just an effort to test how mean we can be to the most vulnerable people in society. This book turned me off of the idea of benefits in favor of entitlements. Rich seniors receiving Social Security should not be treated better and have an easier time than single mothers trying to prevent food insecurity. This is not to say that we should hassle seniors. Instead, both should get what they need to live with dignity. The section on child protective services was not my favorite. It didn't feel like it belonged in the book. But generally I agreed that inflicted time taxes stink.

[allison schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very important reframing/consolidation of the frustrations and injustices millions of Americans face every day. This book gives us important and necessary language for understanding “the time tax” and advocating for change. Everyone should read this book.

[sydney]

for work

[Mike Hartnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important topic, just-finely told.

[Derek Ouyang · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

A whole professional couple has now written books that are derivative of Pahlka's Recoding America. This one is very much worth reading for the yet uninitiated, but it left me yearning for the stronger editor that would have put the strongest idea more front and center: that we ostensibly levy taxes to discourage something, so by calling this a time tax, we stand to gain a new well-conceived Overton shift and spotlight on the taxers and their motives. That opportunity, unfortunately, is largely squandered here.

[Hannah Leverenz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted more out of the recommendations and alternatives portion!! But Annie is way cooler than her husband and that’s a fact.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Welcome to the Continent-Spanning DMV
In “The Time Tax,” Annie Lowrey Explains Why American Citizenship Comes with So Much Hold Music
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 18th, 2026

Doing paperwork is supposed to be the blankest of civic errands: a pen, a password, a checkbox submitted under penalty of perjury. Annie Lowrey’s “The Time Tax” begins from that blankness and refuses to let it stay blank. A form, in this book, is not a form. It is a gate, a sieve, and a mood. It is a morality play with smaller font. It is where a public promise becomes a private errand, and where a country that says “you are eligible” quietly asks whether you are also patient, literate, resourced, healthy, online, reachable, persistent, unembarrassed, and free between 9 and 5.

Every bureaucracy has its little weather report: the hold music, the missing document, the portal that forgets you, the instruction written in a dialect known only to deputy assistant undersecretaries and obsolete printers. But “The Time Tax” is not really about the minor theater of the help desk. Its subject is the counter window, the login loop, the renewal notice, the interview, the line that moves slowly enough to become a policy position. Lowrey defines the time tax as the paperwork, delay, aggravation, attention, and stamina people must spend to receive rights, benefits, services, or protections that supposedly belong to them already. Her sharper claim is that these burdens are not stray clerical fog. They are an unprinted bill, and the people with the least margin are often charged the highest rate.

Marcella Patino, a low-income single mother in Utah, becomes the book’s first human proof. She is trying to keep Medicaid, food assistance, and cash aid while working, raising three children, and trying to make too little money behave like enough in a city that has become too expensive. The state keeps asking her to prove and re-prove her need; one submitted document can knock another program sideways; a job change can be misread as two jobs; a missing upload can become a lost benefit. Lowrey calls this a “paperwork vortex,” and the phrase is exact. Patino is not simply filling out forms. She is being spun by them.

Early on, the book assembles a grim civic roll call: a mother who misses pandemic stimulus money because the application portal is open too briefly; a man in Mississippi unable to regain voting rights after serving his sentence; a parent begging an insurer to cover a child’s autism care; an entrepreneur defeated by permitting delays; a doctor unable to practice because a visa renewal stalls; a family waiting on FEMA after a hurricane; voters waiting hours; passport applicants missing the trip they planned for years. Lowrey does not need each story to be extraordinary. The point is that they are ordinary in the same terrible way.

The structure has the mercy its subject withholds: you can see the route. Lowrey starts with the present-tense machinery of benefits, taxes, disability, health care, voting, immigration, permitting, and the private paperwork engines that shadow them. She then digs down into older habits of suspicion, from poor relief and mothers’ pensions to Jim Crow and the compromised architecture of the New Deal. Later chapters follow the damage into bodies, households, voting habits, and trust. The final movement turns to reform, without pretending that a machine built from suspicion, law, software, budget fear, and habit can be coaxed into working by a cleaner font.

Rather than making the old, lazy argument that government is incompetent by nature, Lowrey notices that some public systems work with plain competence. The Postal Service delivers mail without making each citizen prove a moral entitlement to envelopes. Medicare enrolls seniors automatically. Social Security, for all its frustrations, has the dignity of an earned and legible guarantee. The contrast matters. “The Time Tax” is not a sermon from the church of smaller everything. It is about the form, the rule, the deadline, the office that answers, and the office that lets the phone ring. It is about the difference between a benefit that exists in law and a benefit that survives the trip to the applicant.

In that difference, Lowrey finds her best pressure point. She makes the application, the portal, the renewal notice, and the waiting room answer for themselves. Political argument often stops at the law, the eligibility rule, the budget line. Lowrey keeps walking until she reaches the counter. She asks what happens after a legislature creates a program, after an agency publishes a rule, after a website goes live, after a person is told there is help available somewhere behind the next login. Her subject is the conversion of policy into ordeal: the moment a benefit becomes a test of stamina.

Poverty here has paperwork. It is not only a lack of money but a condition of renewed scrutiny. To be poor is often to have your time treated as endlessly spendable by people who would not tolerate the same extraction from their own calendars. Someone with money can hire an accountant, an attorney, a doctor’s office manager, a permit expediter, a concierge, a college counselor, a tax preparer, a broker, a babysitter, a professional who knows which door to knock on and how loudly. Someone without money is expected to become all of these things while hungry, ill, exhausted, grieving, working an unstable schedule, or raising children.

At her best, Lowrey exposes the coercion hidden in small administrative verbs: upload, renew, certify, attend, appeal, verify, substantiate, resubmit. These words sound neutral until they are arranged around a person with no computer, no car, no paid leave, no childcare, no scanner, no margin. Learning costs become the hours spent discovering that a program exists. Compliance costs become forms and interviews. Redemption costs become the difficulty of actually using the benefit. Psychological costs become shame, panic, civic disgust, the slow erosion of belief that anyone on the other side of the counter cares.

Paperwork usually sits in the background of policy arguments, like office furniture no one wants to describe. Lowrey drags it to the center of the room. The food-stamp application, the disability hearing, the Medicaid renewal, the voting line, the asylum appointment, the insurance appeal: these are not marginal irritants surrounding policy. They are where policy touches skin. A right that cannot be navigated is not fully a right. A benefit that disappears when a caseworker miskeys a job change is not fully a benefit. A state that requires eleven hours in line for a ballot has not simply inconvenienced a voter; it has made a theory of citizenship stand on sore feet.

Among nearby books, Cass R. Sunstein’s “Sludge” names the friction that blocks people from desired or deserved outcomes; Jennifer Pahlka’s “Recoding America” brings impatience with public systems that fail at delivery; Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan’s “Administrative Burden” supplies much of the scholarly architecture. Lowrey’s book is rangier, angrier, and more public-facing than those companions. It wants not only to define a problem but to give private exasperation a usable vocabulary. It translates “why is this website so bad?” into “why does this country make access so expensive?”

Democracy, too, appears here less as a marble noun than as a series of thresholds. Lowrey’s voting material is especially useful because it shows how procedure can arrive dressed as neutrality while distributing power. Registration requirements, inactive-voter rules, inaccessible ballots, felony disenfranchisement, long lines, and local discretion can all be defended as administrative necessities. Together, they suggest a grimmer possibility: process can do the work of prohibition while retaining the manners of paperwork. Offer the thing. Make the path punishing. Blame the person who does not arrive.

It matters that Lowrey treats private bureaucracy as a neighboring climate. Insurers, landlords, subscriptions, credentials, and medical billing all have their own ingenious ways of turning time into tribute. Companies can make purchase frictionless and cancellation maddening. They can make enrollment instant and exit documentary. They can demand a form no one has, a code no one knows, an appeal no one will read. That widening gives the argument reach, but it also loosens its grip. The “time tax” works least well when it begins to cover every modern inconvenience, not just the tollbooths placed before rights, benefits, care, and recognition.

Much of the middle third is persuasive but crowded, as if the argument keeps finding more evidence than it can comfortably seat. Bureaucratic ordeals share a narrative rhythm: a person applies, waits, calls, uploads, corrects, appeals, misses, loses, starts again. Lowrey often uses that sameness intentionally; repetition is part of the indictment. Still, not every case deepens the analysis equally. Some examples illuminate the mechanism. Others decorate a verdict already earned. The reader occasionally feels as if the book has opened one more tab in a browser already smoking gently at the edges.

Inevitably, some of that overabundance comes from the hunger of the frame. The time tax is not one bad office or one bad law. It is the shadow cast by means-testing, racial suspicion, federalism, underfunding, privatization, technological neglect, legal defensiveness, fraud panic, and institutional self-protection. Lowrey’s account of the New Deal is especially clarifying because it shows two administrative futures emerging together: the relative smoothness of Social Security and the state-by-state maze of unemployment insurance and welfare. The United States did not merely build programs. It built programs whose doors could be narrowed by local control, moral testing, and procedural discretion.

The prose has a reporter’s appetite for the exact absurdity and a columnist’s relish for the phrase that clicks shut. Lowrey likes a vivid metaphor and usually earns it. America becomes a “continent-spanning DMV”; official language becomes “High Bureaucratese”; the safety net becomes not a net but an unmarked map of doors open at different hours. Her wit works because it is not cruelty aimed downward. It is exasperation aimed at systems that make people ridiculous and then punish them for seeming confused. The jokes are small windows opened in a very stuffy office.

Readers looking for lyric transfiguration may find the prose built more for traction than shimmer. Lowrey is not writing a misty elegy for the fax machine. She is writing policy argument with nerve endings. Her sentences tend to be clean, cumulative, and energetic rather than sonorous. She builds momentum by stacking instance upon instance until irritation becomes pattern, then pattern becomes politics. The style shapes the meaning: the lists burden the reader just enough to make the clerical pileup felt, while the categories prevent the book from becoming one long scream into the customer-service queue.

One of the book’s most persuasive later turns is from paperwork to health. Illness, Lowrey shows, does not excuse people from administration; it multiplies it. A brain injury, a chronic condition, a disability claim, a medical bill: each can arrive with a second ailment attached, the logistical disease of American care. The patient becomes records clerk, insurer negotiator, debt manager, benefits attorney, and self-advocate. Here the time tax is not merely inconvenient. It is a stressor layered onto pain, one more demand placed precisely where capacity has been reduced.

Politics enters most sharply in the book’s treatment of “efficiency.” Lowrey is mordant about the difference between making government usable and merely attacking government under the banner of modernization. Her discussion of DOGE is less interesting as a partisan episode than as a conceptual test. Cutting staff, disrupting agencies, or waving around the word efficiency does not necessarily reduce the time tax. It may increase it. A government can be smaller and harder to use, leaner, harsher, and less reachable. The question is not whether the state has fewer people in the building; it is whether the person outside the building can get what the law says is theirs.

Our current fights over Medicaid rules, tax filing, medical prior authorization, benefit churn, voting access, and immigration backlogs all move through Lowrey’s subject: time, proof, design, suspicion. Her point is that a society can change people’s lives without formally taking a benefit away. It can simply require another interview, another portal, another monthly report, another in-person appointment, another document from an employer who will not answer. The denial arrives wearing the polished little shoes of process.

Underneath the reform chapter is a wonderfully humiliating insight for the state: some cruelty is just bad stationery with a budget. In Michigan, the nonprofit Civilla confronts a benefits form so long, invasive, and unreadable that it seems less like an application than a character assessment administered by a hostile cabinet. Officials are made to experience the process as applicants do: the waiting, the confusion, the procedural drag. The form is shortened, clarified, humanized. This is not a utopian revolution. It is something more embarrassing and more practical: proof that some of the cruelty was never necessary. It was just sitting there in boxes and lines, mistaken for seriousness.

Lowrey’s repair agenda is usefully unglamorous: count the burdens, simplify the forms, centralize what fragmentation has made cruel, remove needless barriers, invest in civil servants and public technology, and make agencies answer not only for improper payments but for eligible people they fail to reach. None of this becomes easy because the verbs are sensible. Privacy rules, procurement habits, courts, local power, legacy software, anti-fraud panic, budget fights, and ideological distrust do not vanish because a form gets friendlier. Lowrey knows this, but the fix-it chapters sometimes move faster than the resistance they would meet.

One leaves “The Time Tax” with anger more accurately addressed: not at public help, but at the needless tollbooths placed before it. Its excellence is mainly intellectual and emotional rather than formally daring: it gives a private misery a durable public name and shows how often the minor humiliations of access are not minor at all. I would rate it 84/100, which translates under my scale to 4/5 Goodreads stars: a strong, serious, vividly argued book, not the last map of the maze, but far too clarifying to file away as another volume about red tape.

Still, Lowrey’s deepest insight is that bureaucracy is not what happens after politics. It is one of the places where politics happens. A country reveals itself not only in what it promises, funds, subsidizes, insures, licenses, or declares to be a right. It reveals itself in what it asks people to endure before the promise can be claimed. In “The Time Tax,” the form is never just the form. It is the door, the lock, the line, and the small window sliding shut – unless enough people decide, finally, that the window was built to close.

[Chris M. · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Overall, I would rate it 3.5/5. It provides a great historical narrative about government services and their origins. It also highlights a lot of challenges related to obtaining services. It would be hard to disagree with the notion that this Time Tax already places added stress on people who are already stressed out. There are enough studies that show that chronic stress already diminishes your mental bandwidth and fluid intelligence.

She also highlighted the misconceptions around fraud. Fraud or abuse of government services and aid was more often than not committed by groups, not individuals. It is also interesting to consider that the highest consumption of government aid is in Appalachia and the MIssissippi Delta region which usually vote republican, which seems like an interesting paradox.

Although the book provides a great narrative, it doesn't offer anything new or groundbreaking. The How to Fix It part also feels incomplete.

[Alicia Garcia-Webster · Rating 1 out of 5]

Confusing. There are a million and one examples in this book of how our government wastes our time, money, and resources and imposes a "time tax" on our citizens, particularly the lower classes. This would be obviously true to anyone with eyes and ears regardless of which administration is currently in office. But the author seems to think that expanding and enlarging those programs would somehow make them better and more efficient? Yeah, you lost me there. If you can't keep your room tidy, you don't make it better by buying more stuff, but by eliminating excess. It would seem like reducing bloat, inefficiency, and governmental bureaucratic red tape might be a better solution, and I say that as a card-carrying member of the lower classes. ** I received this book for free, but all opinions are my own.

[Nicole DiStasio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine. But nothing new.

[Maggie]

Pretty interesting, though maybe it should have/could have been a long form magazine essay.

Here, though, is an apt handful of paragraphs:

Individual time taxes rarely generate enough outrage and interest to instigate the slow boring of hard boards in Washington. They're not salient to enough people. They re not salient to the right people, especially rich donors whom politicians hold in such esteem. We do not have a shared vocabulary for talking about the time tax. When politicians implement voting restrictions, they say they are targeting fraud; when they tighten work requirements, they argue that they're motivating people to get a job; when they propose a tax credit instead of a direct benefit, they frame it as a matter of expediency; when they offer a loan guarantee, they talk up their commitment to ending the affordability crisis. Nobody calls them out on how they're spamming their constituents and wasting everyone's time.

Yet Americans are living in an all-encompassing bureaucratic nightmare. They hate the health-care system. They hate the IRS. They hate doing their own taxes. They hate not knowing if and when they might be able to access an aid initiative or whether they'll get a permit. They hate open enrollment. They hate government websites. They hate figuring out how to get a passport, register to vote, and secure a driver's license. They hate student loans. They hate the courts. They hate figuring out how to get on UI. They hate being hounded with robocalls and stuck in ridiculous contracts; they hate encountering brokers, facilitators, lawyers, and expediters at every turn.

By no means do I believe that eliminating the time tax would heal our political fractures and spur Americans to be proud of their government again. Yet the time tax is a reason that people don't trust Washington and don't trust one another. And I certainly believe we're past due not simply for reform, but for a reckoning. {p. 230-231}

Many many things we encounter every day could be streamlined. Enrollment in Medicare is fairly straightforward; enrollment in Medicaid is not. Paying taxes could be simple, but it isn't. Obstacles to getting IDs abound, though every newborn leaves the hospital with a social security card / number in the works.

[Hoosier4321 Teresa H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Annie Lowrey’s The Time Tax is a well-researched and often frustrating look at the hidden cost of dealing with government bureaucracy. Lowrey gives a name to all the hours, paperwork, delays, and mental energy that go into accessing benefits and services: the “time tax.”

What makes the book particularly compelling is Lowrey’s argument that this burden falls hardest on people who have the fewest resources. In that way, bureaucracy can reinforce inequality and even make people lose trust in government. Through history, statistics, and personal stories, she shows that these obstacles aren’t just annoying inconveniences, they can have real effects on people’s health, finances, and opportunities.

I especially liked how the book made me look differently at everyday systems I usually take for granted. At the same time, Lowrey offers some hope by showing that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be this complicated. Other countries have found ways to make government services much easier to understand and navigate.

I didn’t agree with every solution Lowrey suggests, but I found her overall argument convincing and thought-provoking. The Time Tax gives readers a useful new way to think about the everyday frustrations of forms, paperwork, waiting, and red tape. It’s an enlightening read, and the kind of book that could spark some interesting conversations.

I am glad to have won this book through a Goodreads Giveaway.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an approachable starting point for those who are interested in the structure of how our government provides services. If you, like me, enjoyed the discourse during COVID about the efficacy of means testing, then this title is a great next step in exploring these policies.

I found the background and analysis the most interesting parts of this book. It's usually hard to land the plane when it comes to solutions of big, overarching societal problems. I think Lowrey does address the solutions moderately well but I could have used a bit more detail in that section. That probably would have made the book a bit more of a slog, but this is a book focused on policy and I imagine anyone interested in that topic would be glad for a bit more in depth look at the solutions.

Many of the negative reviews I see on here seem to be written by people who ideologically disagree with Lowrey that providing more services for the same amount of money is a better course than spending x on limiting access to a service to the same end cost. I can only assume they thought this was some libertarian-leaning take on the government's failures--though I would note that Lowrey's previous book was about UBI, so obviously not that kind of book. If you don't believe that providing easy access to these services is the government's job, then this probably isn't the book for you.

[John Brekke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Neoliberal Brain rot, of course Annie is an Atlantic writer.

My actual objection is less “administrative burden isn't real” and more “why is this particular form of time consumption being elevated into a political category that obscures vastly larger and more coercive forms of time extraction?”

And I think that criticism basically dismantles this book.

The phrase “time tax” is doing ideological work. It makes government bureaucracy sound like a tax on an otherwise free person, when a huge portion of people's time is already subordinated to capital, employers, landlords, family obligations, and other private institutions. The fact that government paperwork is irritating doesn't make it uniquely salient.

And there's a particularly obnoxious implication in treating three hours of bureaucratic hassle as comparable to hundreds or thousands of hours of labor. One is a nuisance; the other is the central economic relationship of your adult life.

You could reasonably say:

If your framework for evaluating institutions is “how much of your time do they consume,” why does the analysis begin with the DMV rather than your fucking boss?

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This premise was intriguing. Pretty much anyone who has ever filled out a government form of any kind in the U.S. knows that they are too long, and use jargon unnecessarily. Those of us with suspicious minds wondered if the forms were designed to get people to give up and go away. In the case of IRS forms, which we can’t ignore unless we want to pay penalties or perhaps go to jail, they’re designed to make us pay someone else to fill them out.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

The author does an excellent job of explaining how deeply this is ingrained into U.S. society, and how long it’s been going on. She also has examples of which government agencies are doing it right, and how other agencies’ interfaces with the public could be modified to be… well, less horrific.

I don’t know anyone in the U.S. who doesn’t have a horrible government paperwork snafu story that was not our fault. I know I do, and I’ve never had to deal with poverty, homelessness, or forms in a language I do not speak.

We can do better, America.

[Tonya Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is for anyone that’s been frustrated filling out their taxes, or who has had to apply for unemployment benefits, or Medicaid, or any other of a slew of dozens of federal programs that are intended to benefit our citizens by suck huge amounts of our time with bureaucratic paperwork and nonsense. This time tax, as Lowrey describes it, is intentional. Policy makers from both parties heap on requirements not only for safety net benefits, but for every interaction with the government. Lowrey points out how frustrating it is that we live in a world where we can order literally anything we want at the click of a button and have it appear as if by magic on our doorsteps days, or even hours, later, but that requires us to spend billions of hours cumulatively to simply figure out how much money we owe the government in taxes. Programs specifically targeted to help low income people are particularly and intentionally onerous, requiring that applicants prove their income and means over and over on multiple different forms for multiple different programs. This is one area where America is not exceptional at all. There’s lots we can learn from other countries that have made accessing public benefits for their citizens as seamless as shopping online. Lowrey highlights Lithuania as an example of a country that intentionally developed a one-stop shop for all of its citizens to interact with the government. Unlike other nonfiction authors writing about problems in America today, I appreciate that Lowrey offers some actual solutions too, though to be honest, I don’t see any of her solutions being picked up and applied because neither political party prioritizes making government less time consuming and onerous as a matter of policy. In fact, in its signature policy legislation of the last Congress, Republicans intentionally added more paperwork requirements to programs for low-income families like Medicaid as a means to drive costs down, knowing that many people who are eligible to receive those benefits simply won’t be able to access them because of the enormous access burden placed on accessing them. This is mainly reading as a rant review, but I’m not mad at the book, just frustrated with the realities that Lowrey does an excellent job illuminating and explaining. As someone who is a strong supporter of good governance and with expertise in administering federal programs, this book spoke to my real and lived experience. However, I don’t feel that I have the power to enact any of the needed changes that this book calls for including federalizing the administration of many programs that are are now delegated to the states, onboarding many government functions that are currently offloaded to contractors, and pivoting our focus to ensuring that all eligible recipients for a program can access its benefits instead of solely focusing on making sure that those who aren’t eligible don’t. I highly recommend that everyone read this book.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's certainly true that we have way too many complications today in dealing with government programs and big institutions. Some of this comes out of well-meaning desires to promote security or fairness that result in excessive rules and paperwork that do next to nothing in serving their stated goals. Some of it comes from people who intentionally impose silly rules to sabotage programs that they are unable to completely kill. Some of it comes from a legal system that tries for justice but only imposes transaction costs. Ms. Lowrey documents persuasively how all of this is much worse in the United States than elsewhere. There is an obvious solution to simplify, simplify, simplify. Design programs with few barriers to participation. Don't worry so much if a few cheaters slip through. Forget workfare, let's have UBI. Let's have Medicare for all. But there's almost never sufficient political will to accomplish this. Maybe we all should just move to Estonia.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and blew through it in one day! It's exceptionally well-researched and made me feel so frustrated every time I flipped the page, which is quite the feat. More than that, it made me think critically about social structures and processes and other topics I don't typically consider in my day-to-day, though I do get bombarded with their results in the form of items added to my never-ending to-do list. I wouldn't say this is the end-all, be-all book on the topic, but it's a solid addition and one that would easily prove to be a conversation starter anywhere. I'm glad I won a paperback ARC of this title in a Goodreads Giveaway. Once I cool off, I might have to reread it, as Lowrey packs so much in that I'm not sure I digested it all on the first go—in a good way. 4.25 stars!

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is infuriating, not in the way it is written, but in the documentation of how our society imposes unnecessary and sometimes impossible procedures on people who qualify for public benefits. These procedures are designed to discourage people from accessing benefits to which they are entitled under the law, or to kick them off the benefits once they have qualified for them, and thus punish them for needing help, being poor, being less educated, or lacking access to the bureaucracy and the levers of power. So, of course, they are imposed on the poor and needy, whose benefits are termed "welfare." When the better-off access government largesse, they are just taking advantage of deserved "tax breaks." The government does not have to work this way, and the author lists needed changes that could save everyone time, money, and frustration.

[Luis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yet another book that had potential, only to be ruined by a leftist journalist from The Atlantic. Everything Republicans do in terms of government service programs is portrayed as bad and criticized as racist and anti-poor, while Democrats are spared. While I do agree that the government bureaucracy imposes the most stupid and annoying rules, it is Republicans who are generally against that bureaucracy. The hurdles are maddening and not a great use of taxpayers' money. However, I would have been more receptive to the argument of this book if it had criticized both Republicans and Democrats equally. It does not, because it was written by a leftist journalist who does not care about objectivity. In addition, this book goes on historical tangents about services in the past or in other countries that are mostly irrelevant to the topic at hand.

[Carol Palmer · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

I had read a book earlier this year about working class people trying to get housing around Atlanta. The hoops people had to jump through to get help from the government. Republicans want more hoops to jump through. The sad thing is that the people who need the help the most are the ones that do not have the time to figure out how to get through them. Wait forever for a Section 8 voucher only to be told no Section 8 housing is available. Starting a new job makes the system think you have two jobs so they cut off your SNAP benefits. It just goes on and on. People say, "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps". The people trying to get government services so they can eat, sleep, and go to a hospital. They don't have bootstraps and many don't have boots.

[Trista · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

This book illuminates and highlights the problems we’ve all faced with bureaucracy and its frustrations in so many spheres of our lives. Roadblocks that are purposely put in our way of getting the services we need. Wasting hours wading thru the bureaucracy. While I found myself upset about all the ways in which we are thwarted, it did not leave me with much hope of it ever getting better, even tho there are other countries in which systems work better. So while I appreciated the flashlight on the issue, we need next steps. How do we fix it?!

[Ryan O'Malley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is important for people on the left to read. If we want big government to work we have to recognize where it goes wrong. Lowry does a great job highlighting the burden the government places on low income folks through tedious paperwork to get their necessary programs. This is not an accident, the right knows it is making these programs worse but that is what they want. While streamlining programs may not be the most attractive political pitch it is very important.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been waiting for this one!

[Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative read -- as someone who has some prior experience working in government-related jobs, I could really appreciate a lot of Lowrey's insights.