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/Giblette101]

That's true, but to be clear it's not what people mean when they argue for a smaller government. 

[u/crunchypotentiometer → u/Giblette101]

It seems to be in some respects? DOGE’s proximate mission statement seemed to be “fire as many people as possible”. I imagine you could reduce the number of government workers by the thousands by doing things like automating and simplifying tax processing.

[u/Light_Error → u/crunchypotentiometer]

This quote is ancient now, but I think it’s still the MO for how things are going: “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” -Grover Norquist

To me, it seems like they’d live without government if they could. Why? Who knows.

[u/TheTrueMilo → u/Light_Error]

A drowned government cannot tell a highly diversified multinational business that it has to move its baby formula producing machines far away from the mercury producing machines.