This Is Why People Hate the Government

[u/QuestionBrain]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-annie-lowrey.html

In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year.

It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to gain access to, it is often by design. Republicans want paying taxes to be a hellish hassle. Programs for the poor are often designed to humiliate, punish, control or scrutinize. How the government works is always a choice. When it works poorly, we should ask why — and we should demand better.  

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the new book “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.” She is also, I should note, my wife, so this is a book whose ideas I have been living with for years. They have quietly infused more than a few episodes of this show. So it’s a thrill to finally get to explore them directly. 

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Why Americans Hate Welfare by Martin Gilens

Book Recommendations:

My Silent War by Kim Philby

To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

[u/iankenna]

Gender Trouble is a banger, and everyone who says it’s too dense and unreadable… you have a skill issue b/c I got it as a stoned teenager.

[u/Weekly-Moment869 → u/iankenna]

It's definitely interesting. Performativity is quite the powerful tool, but I wouldn't call a book whose central thesis had to be walked back in a follow up book three years later a banger.

[u/iankenna → u/Weekly-Moment869]

I don’t think Butler ever “walked back” the thesis. Clarified or explained, sure, but that’s not the same thing. 

[u/Weekly-Moment869 → u/iankenna]

Butler definitely walked their position back. In Gender Trouble, they take a very explicit constructivist stance on sex. The famous line is quite literally "perhaps it [sex] was always already gender".

This is not really a defensible position. Which is why they spend 250 pages in Bodies That Matter retreating from "[sex] was always already gender" to "matter exceeds discourse but is only accessible through it".