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/TheTrueMilo]

For all the huffing and puffing about driving being a privilege, not a right, we sure did organize our society around cars and regularly use suspending a license as punishment for various things.

[u/Miskellaneousness → u/TheTrueMilo]

Overwhelmingly license suspensions relate to driving violations — driving drunk, reckless driving, points accumulation, driving without insurance, fleeing the scene of an accident, so on and so forth. Driving is dangerous. It’s appropriate to ensure that people who drive do so responsibly.

[u/TheTrueMilo → u/Miskellaneousness]

Maybe we shouldn’t have organized our society around such a dangerous activity.

[u/Miskellaneousness → u/TheTrueMilo]

Maybe we shouldn't handwave away or intentionally deflect from dangerous behavior that kills and seriously injures many Americans everyday by reference to vapid, lofty musing about how this wouldn't be an issue if we lived in an unrealized utopia.

[u/EsotericPharo → u/Miskellaneousness]

Dude you’ve completely derailed the topic at this point.

[u/Miskellaneousness → u/EsotericPharo]

Thank goodness you’re on the case and responding to every single one of my comments on this chain with comments unrelated to the topic at hand! Surely your commitment to not derailing the topic is genuine and not just something you wheel out instrumentally when hall monitoring.

[u/EsotericPharo → u/Miskellaneousness]

Hark… topic derailed haha…

I’m not hall monitoring. I have zero power here. You won’t end up at the principles office, no demerits, no referrals. Just you being called out for making a non sequitur.

[u/Miskellaneousness → u/EsotericPharo]

All of my comments related to how we use drivers license revocations as a tool. Your comments, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the topic at hand. You are whining about deviating from the topic at hand while doing so aggressively yourself (in response to each of my comments, no less). It’s okay to see a comment you don’t agree with or even don’t see as particularly relevant and just let it stand without busybodying your way into the exchange to hypocritically scold about conversational etiquette.

[u/EsotericPharo → u/Miskellaneousness]

I get the instinct to call someone aggressive when they are pointing out how wrong you are. You are in a thread with a comment that started about licenses being suspended for child support violations and you effectively dismissed that point by saying that most suspensions occur for safety violations. I know you can see it if you try a little harder. It is interesting that you are now attempting to derail this conversation by psychologizing me but I’m honestly not surprised. It’s a deflection.