Host: I think if you are merely looking at income, the lower down you go, you are spending more time interacting with the government and you're not getting the nice parts, right? Like you're not getting the oo, I'm visiting an American embassy abroad parts. You're getting the standing in line and pee in a cup parts. One of the big problems in left politics is that the very people who Democrats and liberals and socialists think should be the most excited about big new government programs meant to help them are often the least excited.

[cheering]

We're often voting for the party that wants to cut government.

It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. And one reason for this, a reason I think we don't talk about nearly enough is that oftentimes their experience with the government is horrible. Their experience with government programs meant to help them is not just inefficient, it's punitive, it's humiliating, it's controlling. That's because sometimes those programs are built to humiliate, punish, and control them.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She's the author of the new book, The Time Tax, [music] which is all about this. She's also my wife. We are married, so we talk about this a lot at home. [music] She joins me now. Annie Lowrey, welcome back to the show.

Annie Lowrey: Thank you for having me. [laughter]

Host: So, I think people might imagine that I know everything about this book, but but in fact, like when you live with a writer, they will not let you ask anything about their book while they're working on it.

Annie Lowrey: Oh gosh. No. And it's also we have very different like work habits. So, I write almost exclusively between like 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. which is when you are sleeping and getting up to [laughter] meditate because you're like a normal person. So, I feel like there's a real ships in the night quality to all of this.

Host: Yeah. So, this is a huge opportunity for [laughter] me. So to finally find out what this book is about.

Annie Lowrey: Yeah. No, it comes out shortly. So I'm glad that you'll finally be acquainted with it.

Host: So I want to start simply.

Annie Lowrey: Yeah.

Host: What's a time tax?

Annie Lowrey: The time tax is the burden of work whether that's emotional work, logistical work, uh you know like learning knowledge work that goes into any paperwork or bureaucratic process in which you are the enduser. So it's basically thinking of bureaucracy's effect on the people who are being bureaucratized.

Host: you you're sort of describing them here as irksome, but you sometimes have another definition of it I've heard you use, which I always find very vivid where you describe the time text as administrative burdens as a tool of social control.

Annie Lowrey: Yes.

Host: What do you mean by control there?

Annie Lowrey: These things seem neutral. There's this understanding, right? If you're going to get something, there's going to be some paperwork, but these are not infrequently purposeful. They are designed to make people feel good about themselves in their relationship visa v the government or feel bad about themselves in their relationship visa v the government. So they're one of the ways that we construct class. Uh they're a way that we make sure that people can get something and make sure that some people can't. So the way that I think of them is that they are a regressive filter on progressive policies. It's out there, but it's going to be so hard to get that a lot of people aren't going to get it. And I don't think that we really think about the way that we have this regressive filter on a lot of progressive policies.

There a way in some ways in terms of just social control, right? We use work requirements to supposedly get people to work. They're not terribly effective at that depending on the program, right? We can use them to encourage people to get an education. We can use it to shape economic decisions, household financial decisions.

Host: See if you're taking drugs.

Annie Lowrey: Yeah. What can you what can you buy with this? Um, the SNAP program, uh, you have to get food that you're cooking yourself. You can't get hot food. So, you can't, you know,

Host: can't get a rotisserie chicken at Costco. You

Annie Lowrey: can't get a rotisser chicken, but you can get uh like food that you microwave at your house, right? That's actually like that's not just like about nutrition. That's that's a method of control, right? We don't want you just using this uh to be easy. We want you cooking your own groceries. Um, and there's, funnily enough, in a lot of states, there's exemptions for people who are unstably housed or homeless because it's really hard to cook for yourself if you're not living anywhere.

SNAP cards are good, right? Um, EBT cards now, they work just right. It's like your Visa, but it used to be that, you know, still, and in some cases still, right, like you have to separate out the grocery orders. It makes you very visible to other people in the grocery store that you're using it. And I think that that is like a social outcome too.

Host: A tool of humiliation.

Annie Lowrey: Yeah. They want to humiliate you or they are willing to humiliate you so that you can feed your kid. And so that's what I mean when I say that these are social tools, right? And they come with this kind of time veilance. They come with this financial veilance and then they come with an emotional veilance too.

Host: You have a a good line in the book where you say poverty is a social construct not just a material state of being [snorts] and the time tax is part of its construction with forms, summones and sanctions. The government impresses upon poor people that it is their fault they are poor. It applies skepticism to the needy, the overwhelmed and the unlucky that it does not apply to the powerful and wealthy. It does that but it also adds and and you say it this way in other places like a part-time job.

Annie Lowrey: Yeah.

Host: Right. You're already behind. are already struggling with the basics of life and now you have to do all of this. You've been reporting with someone in Utah which like I feel like is a very good example of this. Do you want to talk through that?

Annie Lowrey: Yeah. Um Marcela is a single mom of three kids and she's a manicurist and so she is low income and there's so much that I admire about her. Um, she has just been handed a lot and she has worked so hard to make her life better and her kids life better. When I met her, she was going to school so that like aesthetician school so that she could perform different services, higher value services. When I saw her a couple weeks ago, she has this idea for kind of like a nail tech thing. She'd gone to the University of Utah to ask about like what is a copyright and a trademark? Can they help her patent it? She had found an American producer, like a made in the USA producer. And she had been helped by an amazing nonprofit based in Salt Lake City called Circles, which is self-empowerment, right? Uh people come to these meetings, they get advice, but they're really focusing on getting their income up and and you know having help and accountability towards a plan and it is this enormously enormously great resource that's very different than the experience that people often get when they're walking into a benefit office there.

and she um uses public assistance, Medicaid, other program, SNAP, and uh she was labeled as a fraud risk 9 years ago. And she [snorts] sort of describes this as a paperwork error. She didn't mean to do it, but she can't like afford a tax person. And she didn't know how to, you know, talk to the state about like, hey, we the nail salon I was working kind of screwed me over on this. What? and she paid some restitution to the state. The dollar amount is really low. And ever since then, she has to reapply for her benefits every month or two.

Years later, and these benefits are meant to help her kids, she has never had any issues since then. And the state of Utah has kicked her off of one benefit or another more than 120 times. 120 times and she doesn't have a lot of choice, right? She's got kids to feed in a very literal sense and it's like what what is the point here?

Host: But it's still just a lot of time. I mean, you have this scene where she's being helped by I think at least in part social workers and they're just befuddled in

Speaker A: front of their computer.

Speaker B: Yeah. It takes hours and hours and hours

Speaker A: and she doesn't have a computer, right?

Speaker B: She doesn't have a... she just got one. But she didn't... she didn't have a laptop. She didn't have Wi-Fi, right? She was, you know, went on on on on at some point with me about how hard it was to like get a photo on her cell phone and send it as a fax because she needed to do that. [laughter] And she's like, "How do I... how do I do this thing?" And I'm like, "Why do you got to... why do you have to send anything as a fax?" But you do. And the amount of time, the amount of stress, and it's why I think that she's such an amazing person that she has managed to figure things out in spite of this. So yes, she gets the help, but it comes with this tremendous cost

Speaker A: and it's time she can't spend with her kids working her way out of poverty, being a mother,

Speaker A: doing anything, right?

Speaker A: Working on her nail business.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: And I... I just always think this is such an underrated... like there's all you talk about some of it in the book and this has been like a obsession at times in our household. There's a huge cognitive cost to poverty.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That being poor is like being sleepless.

Speaker B: Yes. And like we've... people have like done this, they have looked at it, they have done all kinds of experiments.

Speaker A: It's equivalent to pulling an allnighter

Speaker B: and it's just constant like thinking about things and mental weight and it just makes it harder

Speaker B: to pull out that if the point of the state was to make it easier to not be poor that these states that believe the way you're going to do that is wrapping people in procedure and humiliation. It's exactly the opposite. Oh,

Speaker A: the like you need to make it easier for people to move forward in their life, not harder. Yes.

Speaker A: Like if you're poor, it's hard enough,

Speaker A: right? And there's this idea, the ordeal mechanism theory, so this is this like very, you know, probably nobody has ever heard of this. Comes out in the 1980s that basically in government programs, you want to make them a bit of an ordeal. And what that is going to do is that is going to get people who don't really need the benefit not to get it, right? It's going to discourage them.

Speaker A: Um, and it's also going to help you protect about against fraud. It's going to, you know, increase the public's confidence in a given program. And I think layered onto that is this idea, this almost puritanical notion, if you're getting something, you got to work for it. It shouldn't just come to you. And so if you're not working or not working enough in the labor market, you should... you should have to work for these things. You shouldn't just get them. And in fact, you needed to have all of these little structures and these rules in order to build the kind of mass public's trust. But this didn't always totally make sense to me because it's not like people liked welfare better after 96. It's not like a more popular. Nobody's like, "Oh, that's a really great program today." So I don't think that adding administrative burdens to it improved it.

Speaker B: But so then what happens in 96?

Speaker C: Today we are ending welfare as we know it. But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended but for what it began.

Speaker A: In 96 uh the program is required to have work requirements. It's required to have sanctions for non-compliant users of the program. There's a time limit. You can only get it for five years. no matter how many kids you have, right? If you have one kid and then you have a kid 10 years later, like you're not going to get TANIF, right? It stops being an entitlement. So, if you meet the criteria, you don't necessarily get the benefit. It gets block granted to the state. And they've never changed the block grant amount, even adjusting for inflation. It's still 16.5 trillion dollars per year. So tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. From now on, our nation's answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare. It will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work. Today, we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life.

Speaker A: For the people who are receiving the money, they have to do so much work to get this really poulry benefit. and the benefit is so hard for them to get and the application is not just difficult to do but the application is like humiliating, embarrassing, something that nobody actually wants to do often because the benefit is so small. So one example of this is that let's say that you were a teenage parent and you weren't married to the father of your children. state requires you to identify the father of your child to the state so that they can go after the dad for child support. And you might think, okay, that's like reasonable, right? Like maybe that helps the non-custodial parent become more involved in the life of their kid. But if you actually talk to mothers who are complying with this, they say things like, "I actually have a pretty good relationship with that guy, but he's really poor." and like what if he becomes homeless because he's been garnished for child support or they might say I was in an abusive relationship and I don't want to identify the father of my child to somebody I don't trust right to some state admin what I'm going to tell them about one of the hardest things that happened in my entire life and so non-compliance with the child support rules which again I think they have a fine theory behind ind them leads to in some cases like half of the people who get sanctioned by the program which is this sort of punitive you're not complying with the rules we're going to claw your benefits back um depending on the state are sanctioned for that one policy alone and tannif now is so ineffective that it does not actually change the child poverty rate it has no effect on it is like one of my favorite right the program that we have that has this supposed goal has gotten so jumbled up and the money goes to so many different things and the states administer this program often with such cruelty that it doesn't actually do anything.

Speaker B: So I think this gets it the the big distinction operating across a lot of these programs which is the programs where we intuitively or by default think people are deserving.

Speaker A: Yes. and the programs where we treat them intuitively or by default, right, the government does, right,

Speaker B: with suspicion. They they have to prove themselves worthy.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And I think it's useful to sort of jump back and forth a little bit between them. The postal service is kind of an amazing example here of a program uh of a government um operation

Speaker A: that just decided everybody is worthy of getting their mail delivered

Speaker B: no matter where they live. You you talk about a a art project I guess by Steven

Speaker A: Brower

Speaker B: um at New York's uh school of visual arts. Can you just talk about that and talk about the post office as a kind of counter example here?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So, he has these students, art students I think, and he asked them to send him a letter. So, these students, they draw maps, they make pictures, like they write things in kind of unusual type faces and fashions, right? And they're art students and basically all of the mail gets to him because the postal workers like figure it out. They look at the map and they're like, "Okay, like we'll take it. You know, it has a stamp on it. We're gonna try." Or they're like shading and oluding and trying to figure the addresses out. And I think that the postal service has this service orientation. It is in so many ways like the most amazing service I think in American life. They operate everywhere. You don't have to register your address. They deliver mail by skiff in some cases. It's like I think like those boats that you do this they deliver mail by mule to the base of the Grand Canyon.

Speaker B: Who who lives at the base of the Grand Canyon and has a

Speaker A: there's a hotel there and there's a a Native American reservation I believe is there. There's people down there. They make a good faith effort to get mail to everyone.

Speaker B: But this gets to the question of deserving undeserving. We have decided you are deserving of getting your mail delivered.

Interviewer: You live somewhere. There's not a question. Medicare, you turn 65.

Author: That's it. It happens pretty easily. And we were talking about this in the team as we were preparing for this and one of the questions somebody saying, well, it's like, well, that's easy because it's just when people are getting to retirement age, but no, these social security in the sense that you get different amounts depending on what your income has been, what you've paid in. Medicare has multiple programs within it.

Interviewer: So, why are they easy? Is it like a lack of administrative complexity in figuring out who it is or is it something else?

Author: Seniors vote. Seniors are enormously politically powerful as a constituency in the United States. This is a contributory benefit. And there's this idea that the government is kind of saving your money and giving it back to you. That I think is a pleasant fiction. That's not how it works.

Interviewer: Yes. Regardless, there's this idea that yeah, if you don't earn social security, you're not going to get social security.

Author: And I would, you know, there's tremendous amounts of beautiful political science research that shows that participating in social security makes you civic, makes you feel like an American, and then you'll come out as a constituency to defend it. And a lot of other programs don't have that. Many other programs don't have that.

Interviewer: You talk a bit about the research on this of what happens when you interface or depend on programs that humiliate you that make you jump through a lot of hoops. What does happen?

Author: The work that I like on this one of the great pieces of work on this and there's a lot in political science and there is a lot in sociology is this work by Joe Soss and he looks at moms who are on cash welfare and compares them to moms that are similarly situated in income terms but aren't getting the program and he finds that welfare makes people withdraw, right? It makes them less civic, less likely to vote. They develop this adversarial relationship with the state because they see the state as being a source of aid and help, but also a tremendous threat to them and their children personally. And the government through programs like this is imparting a sense of worth on people, political worth, right? It's saying, "Well, maybe you deserve to be treated like this. Maybe this is how much we care about you." And people absorb that feeling. You get the sense that Social Security cares about you. You get the sense that the postal service cares about you.

Interviewer: One of the parts of the book I found very moving is in the latter half you tell these two stories and one of the people is she works for sort of a boutique real estate agency.

Author: Mhm.

Interviewer: And she gets a bad head injury.

Author: Yep.

Interviewer: And she's treated she ends up in what you describe as like a paperwork vortex with the state. But is she and her family sort of react to that as an injustice?

Author: Yes. Like they I don't know what their income background is, but clearly they're not used to being treated this way by the state.

Interviewer: She's college educated. Siblings are college educated. Yeah.

Author: And you compare it to someone who doesn't come from that and how much they're just like, yeah, this is the way the state treats me. But it reminded me and I often think that people they'll look at how sort of working-class voters are often less trusting of the government, right? They vote more Republican now. Yeah. Yeah. And they sort of think there's just a strange like a false consciousness there or it's all culture issues. But often times working class voters have terrible experiences with the government.

Interviewer: Awful.

Author: And I think that's actually quite underplayed in why sometimes they are not as enthusiastic about, you know, liberal or, you know, leftist government programs as one would think, right? Like you know, if you've had good experiences with the government, you think, oh, redistribution, it's going to be great for everybody.

Interviewer: Yeah. But then if you've been on the business end of redistribution sometimes it has maybe been really humiliating and timeconsuming for you.

Author: Absolutely. This is one of the complications I think to the what's the matter with Kansas theory. Right. Um which is that these are voters voting against self-interest.

Interviewer: Yeah. They're voting against their own self-interest. Right.

Author: Yes. The people who are middle class, who are college educated, I have spoken with and there are many who have the bumpy fall down the income ladder and then have to interact with the government as a supplicant who is there begging for help are traumatized. Often they're like, "Wait, you're treating me like I'm poor?" And they don't conceive of themselves as being poor. They conceive of themselves as having a hard time. And that's fair and fine. But yes, I think if you are merely looking at income, the lower down you go, you are spending more time interacting with the government and you're not getting the nice parts, right? Like you're not getting the oo, I'm visiting an American embassy abroad parts. You're getting the standing in line and pee in a cup parts. You're getting the I'm going to humiliate you. I'm going to treat you like you're a fraud risk. But then again, there are some parts of the government that even highincome folks deal with that are absolutely miserable. They just have more capacity to handle it.

Interviewer: I want to get to the parts that rich people do interact with in a second, but I had asked you before this if you had a favorite time text, if you had a favorite form, a thing that exemplified what you're talking about here. And so maybe as a way of illustrating what we're actually describing. Um you said you did. What is it?

Author: The DHS 1171.

Interviewer: Oh, of course. [laughter] Um, there is a guy named Michael Brennan who used to run one of the United Ways in Michigan and now runs a firm that helps the government and other, you know, agencies redesign enrollment processes and things like that around people, human-centered design. And he for years carried around the DHS 1171 in his pocket, like a little miniature version of it.

Author: You meet the most interesting people.

Interviewer: I do. I do. I'm an [laughter] I'm an extrovert. I'll yap with anybody. But he um you know and it reminded me of right like a priest carrying the Bible or like a lot of politicians are constantly they love miniature constitutions and uh that was because this was the main application for aid in the state of Michigan and it was uh 18,000 words and a thousand questions. A thousand questions.

Author: A thousand questions.

Interviewer: And you might not have to answer all of those, but regardless, if you're like, I'm not sure if I can feed my kids, this is the form that you're filling out. And so, Michael Brennan and his organization, Cilla, helped to redesign it. But until recently, this was the form. And I have it if we want to look at it. Okay.

Author: Love a prop.

Interviewer: So, this is on kind of like two-sided paper. So, it's actually kind of smaller than it, you know, but take a look here at the what that says. What that

Author: I I do want I've not seen this one before. This is a lot of boxes.

Interviewer: It's terrible.

Author: If this person is under 22, complete this section. Who paid for this child's birth expenses? State, parents, another person. What was a marital status of the mother while pregnant with this child? If married or divorced, marriage date, separation date, divorce date, order, county, state, order, county, state. If single, this child's conception date, city for the same question, conception, city, state, country, has an affidavit of parentage or court order name someone as a father,

Interviewer: where your kid was conceived.

Author: Doctors don't ask you that. This is the state telling poor people to go themselves. That's what that is. I cannot imagine how upsetting it must be to already be in a state of risk or distress and you're going to the state for help like for help and they're like, "Oh, was..."

Speaker A: What day was your kid conceived?

Speaker B: "What day was your kid?" I don't know what day our kids were conceived.

Speaker A: Nobody does. That's not like a thing. And what is the state telling you when it asks you that?

Speaker B: It's also just a kind of if you go through this form, it's very intimidating as a form. It's hard to read. It's like it's enormous. It tells you a lot that if you like I'm just looking at the front. It's like if you don't give correct information. I mean, what if you get the conception date wrong?

Speaker A: I look at something like this and here's my question for you about it. Is the way you understand this form that the government here was incompetent, rulebound, fetishistic of procedure? Or is the way you understand this form more the way you said it a minute ago that this is not a government that is not thinking about the time tax? This is a government with exquisite sense of what the time tax can do. This is government weaponizing the time tax because it does not want people to complete this form because it wants you to get it. And its view of you is if you're asking us for help, you should pay. And if you can't pay with money, if we're going to have to support you, then you better really need it. And the way we know if you really need it is if you will subjugate yourself before us. If you will humiliate yourself in this way. And that it, you know, in this telling right, not my view, acts as a virtuous disincentive to people going on the public dole.

Speaker B: I think it is all of the above. Oftentimes I think that these documents kind of happen by accretion. There's some state laws, there's some federal laws, they ask that you figure this out. Some of it's well-intentioned like maybe we'll get you this extra little bit of assistance if we know that you're at risk in these categories. But this is constructed by people who have a law degree and are talking to lobbyists and are wearing suits. And it is constructed to meet the state's needs of like, okay, what do we feel like we need from these people? What are the legal requirements? What given our processes do we need? This is not a form that is constructed with people in mind. The end user, the citizen, the person who's actually at risk.

Speaker A: But so you're saying the way you're describing this, you're saying you actually think this is coming from a government that sees rules, not people, not a government that correctly understands what it is attempting to do.

Speaker B: All of the above. And I think that we have a great example of this in HR1, which is currently rolling out, which is applying a nationwide work requirement in the Medicaid program.

Speaker A: This is the one big beautiful bill act.

Speaker B: One big beautiful bill act. So, so yeah, describe that. So, the main pay for which is not pay for all the tax cuts but pays for some of them are work requirements in Medicaid and SNAP.

Speaker A: Yeah, it extends them in SNAP. SNAP already has work requirements which is food stamps the modern name for it.

Speaker B: And so, there's some just straightforward SNAP cuts. So, refugees and asylees get cut from the program in some cases. Um, and then in SNAP food stamps, it takes the work requirement and it extends it to some categories that didn't have to comply with it before, older Americans, for instance. But then what it does is it takes the Medicaid program and just stop for a second. Medicaid is not a cash benefit. You can't do anything with Medicaid except for get healthcare. So the idea that you would get Medicaid and you would stop working or would just be living on the dole is kind of silly, right? But for the first time ever, it is applying a nationwide work requirement to non-disabled adults in the Medicaid program. And that is the engine, the cash engine driving tax cuts for the wealthy. Not because those people are not poor enough to get on Medicaid, but merely because most of those people will not be able to comply with the work requirement because it's so onerous.

Speaker A: I want to stop here because both because it's a good example and because it's a really massive policy change about to go into effect.

Speaker B: It's huge.

Speaker A: You try to think about this. It's like what is Medicaid for? Yes. We think people should be able to have healthcare even if they're poor.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So now you imagine a person who is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you got to be really poor, 138% of the federal poverty line, which is really low.

Speaker A: and either cannot find a job.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Or cannot get it together in a way where they can like work their way through the paperwork and continuously prove that they're looking for a job in the right ways. And different states are going to implement this and places will implement this in different ways with different levels of difficulty for the people they are testing. What about society is improved if that person now has no coverage when they have a heart attack?

Speaker B: Beats me and they're going to go to the ER and it's going to be uncompensated care that somebody will pay just not Washington. So, will the individual pay because they're not going to get treated for that health condition that they have? I think about this all the time. I'm a type 1 diabetic. No insulin. I'm dead in couple weeks. I don't know, maybe longer. And you are creating this burden where many people on Medicaid are already working if they can. Notably, they just don't make enough or they don't have a job like a nice fancy job like we have that comes with health insurance, right? Or they can only get, you know, a part-time job or whatever. They have caretaking responsibilities. These are not generally people who are just like sitting at home not working and they're not people who have other health insurance options for the most part. I mean, the thing that I always thought was the most telling about this move was that it was not done on its own. You could imagine a world where they did like a big Medicaid reform package and they decided we want to have work requirements and they thought about how to implement them. I would oppose that like all the way through.

Speaker A: Yeah. But it was telling that this was done to get savings so richer people get tax cuts.

Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And there was this tremendous, you know, Donald Trump promised that he wasn't cutting Medicaid, right? This is going to be easy to comply with and what we're going to do is we're going to get people like they kept on citing young men, young men who aren't working to get Medicaid. We're going to get them to work.

Speaker A: We're also the cheapest people to insure, by the way.

Speaker B: Yeah, young men generally don't really use a lot of healthcare, but we actually know that putting a work requirement in Medicaid doesn't raise employment rates because some states have had work requirements. There's some local programs, they've gotten waivers basically to implement them. And when they do this, the employment rate doesn't go up. What happens is that it is a big paperwork cluster and it's expensive for the state to administer and it's hard for people to comply with. And then they lose their insurance and they find out when they're in the ER, right? Because oftentimes if you are a younger person, you're managing this, that, and the other, you might not really realize that you're not insured until all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, I've dislocated my shoulder or I have something that really needs to be checked out." So, yes, as you were saying, this does not work unless it kicks people off. And they said it wasn't a cut. They said they're not cutting, but how are you going to get a trillion dollars from the program without cutting? Um, I would also note that the predominant recipients of government benefits, they're always saying it's about the young guys who don't want to work. They're women. Women who are much more likely to be taking care of kids, much more likely to spend a lot more time doing that, much more likely to be the person who is managing the household. And I think that there is a lack of integrity. I think it would be one thing to come out and say, "We're cutting. We're kicking people off Medicaid. They should

Speaker A: "figure out how to get insurance in some other way." That is a terrible policy, but at least it's honest. This isn't honest. And I was talking with somebody who runs a health clinic that serves an indigent, mostly homeless population of folks, many of whom have a substance abuse problem. And these people, the treatment that they often need is inpatient psychiatric treatment and then wraparound supports to help them get stable. And we know that that is the best way to help them. That is often what they are seeking. That is the care that they get. They're all going to lose their insurance because they're not going to be able to comply with this. They don't have phones. They don't have computers. How are you supposed to comply with a work requirement if you're sleeping in a tent? One of the things that people are very well rewarded for in modernity...

Speaker B: ...is the kind of mind that is very good at managing tasks and bureaucracies and information, that like works with symbolic information very smoothly, that has a lot of executive function, that wakes up in the morning and you know does your morning pages and like writes out your task list by the end of the night. You're laughing at me because...

Speaker A: ...you're describing yourself. [laughter] Um, I hew to a task. It's true.

Speaker B: The great irony is that I've married somebody who's good at this stuff because I do. I have a driver's license. Do I know where it is? Nope.

Speaker A: I think one yes to the first and no to the second.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think it exists someplace in [laughter] time and space. I've literally talked to my therapist on the phone and we have opened the mail together.

Speaker A: So, good insight there. Good insight there. [laughter] If you don't have that, right? If for all kinds of reasons, you know, people have addiction issues...

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: People grew up in homes where they were badly traumatized. People are operating under all kinds of other burdens. People's minds are neurodivergent in a certain way. People have terrible social anxiety.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That makes it hard to do the things that society rewards you for, things that come very naturally to other people. Mhm.

Speaker B: Um, we like pretend that people are all successful because they either worked hard or they didn't. And everybody knows it's...

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And the things that help you work hard and that make you a compulsive worker, you often don't choose those either.

Speaker A: And so you take somebody who is already struggling with this and maybe that is part of why they are poor...

Speaker B: ...because like they just have trouble navigating modernity. They have depression. They have anxiety. They have other health issues. And then you begin to pile bureaucratic procedure on them.

Speaker A: Pile forms you have to fill out...

Speaker B: ...forms that like routinely I get in late or that totally...

Speaker A: ...we get in late...

Speaker B: ...that I get in late. To go back to one thing you were saying before. Yes. I think that high-income people have often a completely different orientation towards this kind of paperwork. And I really like the Bernard Suits idea of having a lusory attitude, right? The lusory attitude is what makes a game a game. Arbitrary rules and this like, okay, I'm going to try and win. And this is the attitude that many high-income people bring to, like for instance, a college application. Yale is going to make you spend 100 hours on the application. You're like, "Oh, that's another place where I can achieve." Right? This meritocratic idea of, you know, the harder you work, the better a boy you are, right?

Speaker A: Or if you have high-priced accountants, high-priced tax preparers...

Speaker B: ...it's a game you're trying to win.

Speaker A: We've talked about this, that sometimes you meet a very high-income person in our line of work and the degree to which they talk about tax avoidance, they really talk about it all the time.

Speaker B: They're like kind of getting off on it. Yeah, exactly. Um, and you know, and I think that we can both take this sort of, and it's actually not just pure Puritan, it's Elizabethan idea of there's deserving and undeserving and we're going to separate these two. I think that importantly in the United States, this has to get filtered through the prism of race, right? The reason that we do not have these kind of universally accessible simple benefits is anti-Black racism, right? A lot of these big programs are set up during Jim Crow. I know that this sounds kind of overly declarative, but I don't think it's wrong.

Speaker A: You brought up deserving, undeserving, poor, and one reason that a lot of these benefits look like this, including in blue states under Democratic governments that believe in Medicaid.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: That believe in TANF...

Speaker B: ...that believe in all kinds of tax credits and hands up and all the rest of it is twofold. That one, fraud is a real problem.

Speaker A: Yeah. And two, that even just politically if you believe in these programs, if they develop a reputation...

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: ...for helping people for whom that help is not deserved...

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: ...the program will be destroyed. Right? This is functionally what happens to welfare, right? We have TANF because the view was, and this was racialized and this was wrong in many cases, but it wasn't wrong in literally every case, that welfare reform was helping people that, you know, middle America didn't think should be helped. And that got strong enough that a Democrat was the one who ended up gutting it.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So what about the arguments, you know, that actual policymakers make for doing things this way?

Speaker B: I think it's important when you're thinking about the shift from AFDC to TANF. This is what happens in '96.

Speaker A: Old welfare to...

Speaker B: ...old welfare to new welfare. And old welfare, it used to be an entitlement. If you met the criteria, you got it. That's not true anymore at all. [laughter] You can meet the criteria... This is true for a lot of public programs actually, housing vouchers, that kind of thing. You can meet all the criteria, you might not get it.

Speaker A: Um, which is crazy to high-income people, I think, where it's almost always like you meet the criteria, you're going to get it.

Speaker B: Yeah. If you have a mortgage, you get the mortgage interest deduction.

Speaker A: Yeah. They're not shuffling around who gets it and who doesn't.

Speaker B: If you're eligible for Section 8 vouchers, you may not.

Speaker A: Yeah. You might not, you know, and you or you might wait 10 years, 12 years, right? And it might not be obvious to you why some people are getting it and some...

Speaker B: It's often, you know, not entirely obvious to the people within those organizations either, I would note, but um, yes, the shift to AFDC to TANF is driven not wholly, but at least strongly by racial concerns, not fraud concerns. Those come together, right? These are two sides of the same coin. The originator, the program that comes like way earlier is this mother's pension program, which is used almost... it's run at the state level. It's used almost exclusively by white women, in which you, you know, if you were a good widow or a woman who had been abandoned and you had kids, you would have kind of a social worker come and it was very paternalistic, but you know, it was supposed to be wages for being a mother and doing the most important work in American life. This is like an old progressive era policy, right? But then when you get ADC, which then becomes AFDC, this is complicated part of Social Security. Um, because it's an entitlement, uh, because Black women are more likely to be low wage, you know, when they have kids.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: They use the program and the entire program becomes about, you know, the media conception of the program. Whenever they show images, there's a really great study by Martin Gilens showing that whenever they show images, they're not showing white women anymore. Even though Black women are never a majority user of the program, they are never, they still aren't. Uh, you know, it's these Black families in urban areas. And that is partially, along with concerns about the rising cost and everything else, is what leads to this backlash that you can actually trace the way that politicians are talking about it. They stop talking about kids. They start talking about moms and they start saying that well these moms need to be working and you know they start saying well welfare is a work program and...

Annie: it transforms and that leads to 96 which then leads to us there. So I would just note that I think that when you are thinking about fraud, it's really important to think about um the racial diversity in this country and the way that that has changed the way that we set our public programs up. Second thing is that there would be way less fraud if the programs were simpler and easier, right? If you have fewer rules and the government does more work to determine like, okay, we're going to look at your tax returns and figure out if you actually get this, we're not going to have asset tests and all these other little kind of fussy finicky things. There would be fewer people getting overpayments, underpayments, inappropriate payments. I would note that we have not a great sense of how much fraud there is in these programs. We have an improper payment error, right? Which is, you know, just right like when they go back and they look, did you get too much? Did you get too little? A lot of it is driven by the by the complexity of the program itself and the fact that the government is not doing the work. It's these people who are kind of pulling together forms or, you know, filling out this and oh gosh, who could imagine anybody filling this out incorrectly? And yes, there's fraud. There's absolutely fraud. I'm not saying that there isn't

Paul: fraud is both real and whose fraud we choose to care about is telling who does a lot of the Medicaid and Medicare fraud doctors or the um heads of large organizations like Rick Scott, a senator from Florida who ran a I believe it's a for-profit hospital organization that was one of the largest fraud that had to do one of the largest fraud settlements with Medicare in history. Yeah. Separately, Donald Trump. You got to you got to be real fancy to do a big Medicare fraud. Donald Trump pardoned um pardoned or commuted, I don't remember, but did one of the two. Um somebody who had settled one of the largest fraud cases with Medicare more recently. You you you do have real fraud on the individ on the part of individuals. On the other hand, Trump and the Republicans gutting the IRS audit division has made fraud a lot easier for high-income taxpayers. You know, they are not going after Medicare and Medicaid fraud um in the way they could. But I mean there are a lot of way like the biggest frauds come from organized actors both legitimate and illegitimate.

Annie: Yeah.

Paul: Who are able to do kind of complex frauds that are not about like putting the wrong name down on a form.

Annie: Yeah. It's unbundling services. It's complicated. You got to

Paul: It's buying fake It's buying like leaked information online and using that to apply for unemployment insurance criminal groups. It's you know you know and you do I mean in Minnesota, right? like the kind of smaller ring frauds which are real whereas organizational.

Annie: Yes, absolutely. I can tell you this. There would be more improper payments in the home mortgage interest deduction tax program which to be clear we should think of as a benefit program because it is even if we don't frame it that way. If you had to do piss tests, how many people would get would get their benefit revoked for that? I wonder

Paul: Mhm.

Annie: if you had to do this form instead of like ticking a single box that actually your accountant is doing because you don't do your own taxes, you know.

Paul: Well, this goes to maybe the time tax and also like a good place to see the choices we're making that the most people interact with in America, which is the tax system itself.

Annie: Yeah.

Paul: So, this is part of the book. Uh, how does our tax system work from this perspective and how could it?

Annie: Oh my gosh. In Japan, for the most part, if you're earning a salary, you don't ever have to do your taxes. Japanese tax authority just does it for you. In a number of European countries, you can like I forget whether it's Sweden or Finland. You do it by text message. Norway. Sorry to the Nordics. [laughter] Paul,

Paul: do they all look the same to you, Annie?

Annie: I'm just I can't remember which one. I'm so sorry. The Danes are over here and they're like, "It's not us." And uh in many other peer countries, they'll just send you a form that's mostly filled out and you can figure out if you want to do any changes and then maybe you sign it, you send it back. It is like visible. You know when Europeans are like wait your health care system works how you got build for what? like you know the whole right like you ask a European like oh how much did it did you have to pay to get that baby [laughter] like pardon um sort of similarly I think if people understood that the IRS I'm not saying they're not like a competent and professional agency at doing what they're doing and in fact I know a lot of civil servants at the IRS that are like chomping at the bit to be able to do people's taxes for them they're not allowed to they're not allowed Well, here's the crazy thing about this because I think it's worth like getting at the mechanism here. The IRS has all the information.

Paul: They do.

Annie: So, the reason the IRS can come after you fill out your taxes and say [clears throat] you underpaid

Paul: Yeah.

Annie: is because they know how much you're supposed to pay.

Paul: Yeah.

Annie: And given that they know how much you're supposed to pay, they could just tell you how much you're supposed to pay.

Paul: And in other countries, they just tell you how much you're supposed to pay and then you're like, "Okay, great." And then you pay it. We even had a pilot program of letting the IRS tell you how much you're supposed to pay in direct file and Trump just killed it. Yeah.

Annie: And people liked it.

Paul: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Direct file. It was great. There's two things. There's two things here. So, one is that the US tax system is so complex. There are so many write offs and kind of arcane fussy little provisions that do require people to tell the IRS. But most people that's like not true for most Americans take the standard deduction which means that you're not itemizing things. It's 9 in 10 take the standard deduction. The second is that there's uh legal prohibitions on data sharing between US government agencies. So HHS might have some information on you. They can't send it to the IRS very easily for the most part. These systems don't talk to each other. And very often in other countries, they do. And for a lot of Americans, the idea of having a government that has a unitary repository of all of this information and it's all connected is really terrifying. We have very little social trust and I think correctly. Why would we? Um, however, you can always give people the option. Make it a permission. I want the government to fill up my taxes for me. I want the government to search for benefit programs and then go get the data from the state tax office and the IRS. You know, just think about optionality. I think a lot of really lowincome people might be like, "Yeah, if I could just tick a box and have them do as much as they could, that would be great." And I think that letting databases talk to each other with permission is different than probably having it in a big database.

Paul: So I want to stop here because one of the moments in the book where you said something that just like stopped me a little cold was you went to Estonia.

Annie: Uh I remember when you went to Estonia.

Paul: You didn't tell me much about that trip. So I read about it [laughter] in your book and you talk about Estonia's only once policy.

Annie: Oh yeah. Like this was so utopic.

Paul: Yeah.

Annie: That it's almost hard to read about it. What what is the Estonia only once policy?

Paul: So Estonia creates a government denovo not that long ago, right?

Annie: Posts Soviet.

Paul: Yeah. They get their independence back and it's all really young people that are not that this is the most important thing, but I do think it's interesting in the history. often the people who are putting a government together in their like 20s and 30s, a lot of them are not actually retirement age now and uh or just barely retirement age now. And uh they are extremely poor. They are financially distressed. They need foreign investment and they need the support of institutions like the IMF. So they want

Author: ...to also after the Soviet experience, they want to have a government that people kind of trust and believe in. And they end up putting together the most uh like technologically advanced government I think perhaps on earth.

Interviewer: Almost certainly.

Author: Yeah.

Interviewer: Like at least in terms of service delivery.

Author: Yeah. And uh they have this policy that if you tell any part of the Estonian government a single piece of information, I had a kid. I switched addresses. It you only tell the government once, only once. So like if you tell your kids school, you know, like here's our new address, it just updates it with every other agency. And they have this unified system of benefits that you can go online and see like your voting record, your property records, um you know, access your medical, right? And I was sitting with a woman who was showing me this and I was like, I don't even know how I would get all of like you know your your educational records, right? Like I was like, does the government have any idea where I the public school where I went to elementary school? How would you even know? And so, yeah, going back to the IRS, there is a challenge, but again, it's like they don't want to meet it. They want you to have to do your own taxes. And so, you know, this costs Americans,

Interviewer: but it's notions of hours. It's not the IRS that wants you to do your tax. It is Republicans in It's not Congress, it's Republicans. [snorts]

Author: Yeah.

Interviewer: Because Republicans forever have wanted taxes to be hard, so you hate the government.

Author: Yeah. And it's not just because they're in the pocket of like big tax preparer although they are a little bit in the pocket big tax preparer like in it and others have done a lot of lobbying on this

Interviewer: lobby so heavily it's a big industry

Author: so heavily

Interviewer: but if every time you meet the government

Author: it is smooth and seamless and you walk away thinking that government's pretty great

Interviewer: then you're going to want more government

Author: totally

Interviewer: and Republicans don't want you to want more government and so it creates this kind of

Author: kind of don't they now right like they want government for some people. There's a whole thing about Donald Trump,

Interviewer: but they don't want to fish a government, although I will say about Doge. One of the things I just remember thinking about with Doge, you and I talking about is a number of times when I would

Author: walk out of here, [laughter]

Interviewer: when I'd be reporting on the way social benefits worked or something and I would run into all of these privacy considerations in the government. We could we can't do the obvious thing because the IRS won't share any data. Yes. And it's like that's a firewall and we just can't get through it even though that's how we could make everything work a lot better. And then it turned out that that wasn't a firewall. And I'm not saying what Elon Musk and Doge did was legal. It was probably not legal. It turned out to be doable.

Author: Look, one way or another, guess who gets to change laws? Congress.

Interviewer: You could make things work better. We have taken too much of how the government works as settled and unchangeable. And it's not. and Doge was, you know, running through walls destructively,

Author: right?

Interviewer: But one thing they really showed was a lot of things that say the Obama or Biden administrations treated as sacrian.

Author: Yes.

Interviewer: Those were guidelines. Those were recommendations from your lawyers.

Author: Yes.

Interviewer: And maybe it's worth it to start breaking some guidelines and rewriting rules in order to make the government work better. There's a deeper issue here which is that Congress does not see itself as the administrator of anything.

Author: You know, my view is Congress should get rid of the filibuster and then when Democrats are in power. Yes. Like they should actually do the things they say they're going to do and vote on a party line to do them and then see if the public likes them and then if the public does like it, they can be reelected.

Interviewer: And that's how democracy is supposed to work.

Author: Instead of this like we can't do anything and we would like you to study congressional procedure to understand why. Let's have a parliament [laughter] on the bumper sticker, dear. Right. Like, take away presidential power and think of a prime minister. It's gonna [snorts] be really popular.

Interviewer: The essay wants to abolish a Senate.

Author: This is the moderate position now.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Author: The thing you're really debating in this book pretty explicitly is the federalization of powers.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Author: That you do not like how many programs are state administered.

Interviewer: You definitely don't like it when it goes down to the county level. Like you're you're arguing for a simpler but bigger and more national government.

Author: Yes, things should be federalized.

Interviewer: What do you want to federalize?

Author: Oh my goodness. So there there are some constitutional issues here. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not going to get into them. Yes, Medicaid federalize it. UI unemployment insurance federalize it. Tannif, if you're going to have it, federalize it. any program. Yeah, this is my bumper sticker is like I hate laboratories of democracy. The federal government is better at doing this. They are for a few reasons. One, they don't have balanced budget requirements, right?

Interviewer: This is actually like a really big thing. States and cities do.

Author: The second is just like a simple who like how many agencies are we going to have doing the same work type question. There's 56 Medicaid programs.

Interviewer: Yeah. What happens when you move?

Author: Yes. It's a constant, right? Like it happens all of the time.

Interviewer: And if you're like housing insecure, you move a lot.

Author: Yeah. Totally. And I think that there is uh a floor that so many state and local pro programs sink below that. That seems like a much more important issue to me than the laboratories of democracy that actually go above and beyond and have great benefits. Although it's very interesting to me that it's not necessarily blue states that have better administration than red states because they're under the same constraints, right? So,

Interviewer: and they're also often so highly proceduralized their own government that they're less effective. Like you often have like more generous benefits in a much more complex bureaucracy.

Author: Yeah, absolutely. It is not the sort of thing like California is a nightmare on a lot of this. They've gotten better on some fronts, but it's just it's not like a simple, you know, the more liberal. It doesn't map on like that at all. It really, really doesn't. But yes, if you could take these programs and federalize them and make it such that the agencies administering them were responsible for outcomes and saw themselves as a service delivery organization. Yes. It would be a lot better. It would be way better.

Interviewer: Your first book was about universal basic income.

Author: Yeah.

Interviewer: And when I got to the end zone,

Author: I came to think these books were more connected than I had thought when you were writing.

Interviewer: They're twins. [laughter] Like it it seemed to me that you were moving towards something that's more like the government should do fewer things but do them clearly and well, right? Like this seemed to me in the anti-poverty dimension like it was sort of an argument for a negative income tax, right? Not quite a UBI where it's like Bill Gates gets it, but you know, something where if you're below a level, you just get it. We don't test you. We don't put you through hoops. We just say there's a level in this country people do not need to fall beneath. M I mean the the sort of conservative argument over the years for something like UBI or negative income taxes which Richard Nixon pushed at one moment.

Author: Yep.

Interviewer: What I am proposing is that the federal government build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children that cannot care for itself and wherever in America that family may live.

Author: Excellent president up until

Interviewer: the government should do fewer things would do it better. He had some problems. Cambodia I'm not a huge fan of.

Author: Yeah. No, no, no. I'm not I'm not here to [laughter] rehabilitate Richard Nixon. There's a lot of things to be concerned about there,

Interviewer: but a fascinating figure. Um that that seems like the kind of thing you're envisioning here.

Author: Yeah. Look at the child tax credit, right? So the child...

Author: tax credit, it exists. There's this brief moment during the pandemic where they give a really big CTC and it reaches 80% of target families. the IRS administers it instead of some welfare agency somewhere. What does it do? It cuts child poverty in half. And granted, that's mostly due to just the sheer amount, the giant money cannon, but the administrative simplicity, I think, is actually important there. Most people don't have to do anything. The money just shows up. And so, the problem, I think, with running so many programs through the tax code, where it really is much more efficient. And the IRS has become a crucial welfare benefits administrator, even though it doesn't like to think of itself that way, both the IRS and Congress, I guess, is that then people don't notice, you know, um there's amazing research by Suzanne Matler of Cornell that shows that highincome people uh no matter how much they're getting in government benefits, they're always like, "Well, I don't use any government program." That's because it's like their accountant is figuring it out. I I think that they might just not conceive of it that way because we are not beating somebody over the head with like, hey, you got a home mortgage interest deduction, which you didn't have to pee in a cup for, whereas it's really obvious to people getting safety net benefits that they're getting them because they have to go to these offices and fill out all this paperwork and everything. So, I do think that there is this kind of downside to tax programs, which is that, you know, they become invisible, but look, they're way easier for the government to administer, way cheaper, and you're much more likely to get them to the people who you want to get them.

Host: You could also make some pretty simple design tweaks and make things happening through the tax code more visible. I mean, it could come as a large check. It's not that difficult.

Author: Absolutely. I remember there's this whole story from the Biden era where Biden like he's like I'm not going to put my like big signature face on a check like Donald Trump. It's like you should have put your big signature giant face on the check check like Donald Trump. Yeah.

Host: So what do you say to conservatives because I've seen this um case pushed against your book. It's like look this is a great description of how government fails. It is a great description of government complexity. It is a great description of government incompetence, which you agree is at least part of the story here.

Author: Oh, totally.

Host: So, ending in a stirring call for bigger government, more government is like fundamentally paradoxical. Government just do less and be more out of people's lives and not take and waste so much of their

Author: Do they want to take away social security?

Host: Some of them do.

Author: A lot of Oh gosh. A lot of big programs work great. They work really, really well. I think it's not a crazy thing for Americans demand that the government that they pay for works in the way that the governments around the world work. We have low standards. We're letting these get away with murder. I mean it.

Host: You have a great line in the book where you say that politicians care a lot about whether or not a program exists but not really whether it's accessible.

Author: Totally. And it's also and again I think it's the civil servants often they really want these programs to work. They would love to use they are experts on these programs and we don't listen to them either. They aren't like people who are stakeholders. It's not like, you know, you have uh them coming forward and being like, I think that we could make these really good changes and that would result in, right? Like a lot of them want to do that and they're statutoily not allowed. You'd have to get a law passed. You'd have to get a regulation passed. Who are the White House going to listen to?

Host: You're not allowed to speak out. You'd get fired.

Author: No.

Host: Can't go write an op-ed from the I mean, I know through you how many people you talk to in the bureaucracy who are just like hair on fire like funneling you information about how it doesn't work.

Author: Oh my gosh. But nobody wants to make government programs work better than the people who are held back from administering them correctly.

Host: If you've devoted your life to getting people SNAP and now you are not able to get people SNAP, it drives you crazy.

Author: Absolutely. If we treated people as experts in their own experience, by which I mean people who are using these programs and the people administering them, I think things would work much better. Jen Pala I think has like the greatest, you know, exigist of this idea in recoding America.

Host: Recoding America.

Author: Yeah. Guest of the podcast,

Host: past guest for the show, right? Where she describes it as this like bureaucratic anxiety cycle. So what happens is, you know, Congress spends some money, they have some program, the program doesn't work well, and so they put more rules on the bureaucrats who become then less capable of actually administering the program. They get called in before Congress. And so you just end up in this kind of doom loop of like Congress telling them telling these bureaucrats, "Okay, well, here's in an even more specific way what I think you should be doing instead of saying to the bureaucrats, we trust you. Here's the goal. get it done.

Host: We were talking earlier about our government bumper stickers and and I thought about this before. Mine is actually simpler, fair, faster. I feel like Democrats should run and they're going to say the government will be simpler, fairer, and faster. And they should actually make that happen. They should make the policies simple.

Author: They should make them way less corrupted by money. They should actually pass and try to pass in fact a constitutional amendment on money. Um, and they need to make them faster. Right? Abundance is a lot about speed. This book has a lot in the end about speed, too.

Host: And I think when people talk about making government efficient, it doesn't mean anything.

Author: And I don't think Democrats often know what they mean when they're talking about they tend to mean saving money when they talk about government efficiency.

Host: Yeah.

Author: But you want the government to be efficient from the perspective of the person it benefits. And that means it's simple to use.

Host: It treats them fairly and respectfully. And they get what they need from it fast. So their time isn't taxed.

Author: Yeah, absolutely. I think that this is a great way to do it. The thing that I think a lot about is the political economy here, right? If that was a way to win votes and if people wanted that, why doesn't it happen? Because the time tax, it's like a problem. It is a giant mess of a million different problems administered at different parts of government. And that is in fact part of the problem. And I think that the feedback loops are broken in a lot of cases here. So what I mean by feedback loops is that the people who use the most punitive, stupid government programs, they get turned off from civic engagement. So they don't become a constituency demanding for the program to get better. But I think you can actually look at some politicians that have tackled this and it's pretty popular when you can actually do it. So, Zuran Mdani in New York has had this whole, you know, like if you're a small business, it shouldn't take you a million, you know, pieces of paper and all this time to just like get a very basic business license. That's great. And almost like kind of like Republican politics. And I think that, you know, could that politics work for people? I think so. I think it'll be very interesting to watch what people think of Medicaid after the work requirement comes in because I can guarantee you that the stories are going to be about people who can't get cancer treatment. Marginal cases who cannot prove that they are disabled because doctors don't know what condition they have and they don't have a doctor to diagnose them. Isn't that part of the reason that they need health insurance? um this is going to kill people and so I don't think that it's going to be more popular for the Medicaid program. And so um there's this piece of political science research that actually showed that administrative burdens do

Annie: not just make recipients less likely to engage civically. They kind of sour entire communities on the government because they're like, "Wait, why are you treating us like this?" And you know, I would want to see more research on this. I'm really interested. But it makes sense to me. Do people like a government that treats people this way?

Host: I've wondered whether or not the Trump uh Medicaid and SNAP work requirements are going to create an opening. I mean, when Republicans cut government sharply, they often create the conditions for a politics of expansion because people don't like the effect of the cuts. We've seen this happen many, many times before.

Host: People feel the cuts all of a sudden or they fear the cuts all of a sudden. They recognize what they are losing or might lose and it creates focus and it creates like the possibility to do something. Now they've decided to do a massive cut that's going to hit many of their voters. Many Trump voters are on Medicaid or on SNAP. it's going to hit them in very unpleasant, complicated ways and I think give, you know, the opposition an opportunity to make this kind of burden an issue and not just sort of argue for, you know, expansion or restoration of funding, but actually say like this is not what your relationship with government should be. This is not what government should do to you. Make it easier for rich people to cheat on their taxes and harder for you to get

Annie: totally

Host: medicaid. I think that that's absolutely true.

Annie: I am very concerned that SNAP could collapse in some states because one of the things it does is it says to the states if you have an error rate that is above I think it's 6% which like 40 states have a again improper payments not fraud rate improper payments rate above that it uh makes them pay for part of the benefit which they've never had to do before. And I'm very concerned that states will not be able to do this and they will not have the money to cover it and they might just not have SNAP. I've talked to hospital administrators and state legislators who are like what are we going to do when Medicaid gets gutted? How are we going to keep hospitals open? They are going to destabilize whole health systems. I think that they might drive doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists out of the profession. They are creating a mass administrative burden, a mass time tax the like of which we have never seen. 96 TANF reform like that was so tiny in comparison to this

Host: much smaller program

Annie: almost 25 million people. They're sapping billions of hours of people's time to give money to rich people. Yes, I would hope that this would create an opening for actual route to STEM reform, but I think that you could develop a politics of this and for most Americans, you could never have to fill out a tax form or pay an accountant for that again.

Host: Can you imagine how nice that would be? It'd be really nice.

Annie: I cannot I think that's a good place to end. Little little moment of imagining nice things.

Host: Uh always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Annie: So while I was thinking of the books to recommend to the audience, you and I had created this list of books that we mentioned to each other constantly. So one is the book that has changed how I have read every memoir, every autobiography since. I'm not saying it's a good book. I'm saying it's a deranged object that I think everybody should read. And this is a book called My Silent War by Kim Philby. So Kim Philby is a spy, prominent British spy and uh he almost becomes the head of MI6. He's a Soviet agent. He's a Soviet agent and he eventually defects to the Soviet Union and drinks himself to death in Moscow.

Annie: And you know, I think that there was perhaps some expectation of like a warm reception there for all that he had done for the Soviet cause. But of course, the Soviets don't trust him. He's a liar, right? He just spent his whole life uh letting the people that he grew up with, the people that he worked right next to, right? Like sending them home in body bags to their widows. And uh so many books have been written about this guy. many like Ben McIntyre's books kind of come up in this. He is like a kind of a figure in some of the novels of Graham Green because they actually knew each other because Graham Green was a spy. John Laree I don't know what is in John Laree's heart but I think that he hates this guy more than he has ever hated anybody else. And uh but he writes this this book that is I kept on like waiting for them to be right. Is he is he actually like a communist or a socialist? Like what is the and there's nothing there. What a wasted life. What a miserable human being. And um I'm not saying that all memoirs should be read with the same [laughter] skepticism.

Annie: But um so that's one of my books which I think may many of your readers would like. The second is a book that [laughter] I consider

Host: you Annie really mentions this book a lot. She's not lying about this. Kim Philby comes up constantly.

Annie: World historical piece of What a world historical piece of Kim Philby is. [laughter] The second is a book that I consider most insightful about politics and political thinking and it is neither of us are sports watchers but uh it is a book about sports. It is about UNCC and Duke. It is called to hate like this is to be happy forever by Will Bllythe. I bring this up constantly and it is about um you know this famous football JK rivalry sorry

Host: it's basketball [gasps]

Annie: it's about the offsides rule and yes it's about basketball sorry um by Will Bllythe it's really really beautifully written but this book is about right like how habits how acting this rivalry out like inculcates It's the rivalous mindset that's all occurring within people who live within like 12 miles of each other is kind of one of the fun parts about it. And then my third hobby horse book, which I think people talk about this book all the time, but I feel like a lot of people have never actually read it, is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. It will blow your hair back. The reason that we [laughter] don't laugh, I'm a huge listener of Manosphere podcasts along with yours. I'm a really big listener of Joe Rogan and the reason I bring it up all the time is I'm like, has Joe read Gender Trouble? Because wow, I mean, he's camp. This is not like an original point of mine, but he has such a fascinating conception of masculinity and it's enacted in such a wonderfully camp way. And

Host: this is such a take. [laughter]

Annie: This is obvious. I'm not saying it's wrong. This is like table stakes. Have me on, Joe Rogan. I'd love to talk [laughter] about paperwork with you.

Host: Paperwork in your performance of gender.

Annie: Yeah,

Host: I would watch that episode of

Annie: I think it's beautiful. I really, really do. I think it's really really interesting. And one of the things that I think is kind of interesting is there's this idea of just like manly men with the testosterone. And one of the points made in this book is right like you learn what gender is by enacting gender and by this iterative process of emulation of putting on the muscle tea. And

Host: these books are kind of all the same book.

Annie: These are all the same book. Yeah. These are all the same. This is why I brought them together that I'm like if you want to understand psychology don't read well I don't know how.

Host: Don't think your way into actions. You act your way into thoughts.

Annie: Exactly. These are all the same book in very different ways. In very, very different ways.

Host: Annie Larry, thank you very much.

Annie: Thank you.