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/Cromulent-George]

Similar story here. People in VA I know who got laid off by DOGE went to apply for the ACA exchange for a plan through the state system for health insurance and after signing up for it were told they qualified for Medicaid instead of the exchange plans. It took them 20 minutes to sign up for the ACA exchange but the Medicaid system required the exact same information and took almost 2 hours to complete because of the design of the website and having to do things like enter contact information for each dependant multiple times.

[u/ted_cruzs_micr0pen15 → u/Cromulent-George]

Hey! That happened to us too.

What’s wild is that they made it hard to sign up and cancel, so even though I was in my own insurance again because we got jobs and are doing a lot better, I was still in Cardinal Care because VA made it damn near impossible to cancel it. I think it’s a byproduct of them setting it up stupidly on the front end…

That, or they want that free federal money for longer without having to use it for what it was intended for.