Paperwork, lines, hours on hold: There's a 'Time Tax' on Americans who need help most

Hospitality workers wait in line to apply for unemployment benefits at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP hide caption

How much of your life do you spend waiting, either in line, on the phone or while filling out government forms? Annie Lowrey , a journalist with The Atlantic, says all that waiting amounts to what she calls a "time tax," paid most often by those applying for government benefits like unemployment, disability and food assistance.

"I really saw this as a tax, because there's this understanding that, with the government, we should be getting what's ours," Lowrey explains. "How much time, how much effort, how much emotional strain, how much do you have to give up to receive something that you're trying to either purchase or obtain or a right that you are supposed to have?"

In her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It, Lowrey argues that excessive red tape in many, but not all, government agencies often acts as a barrier to people receiving benefits. She notes that new paperwork and work requirements have already cut millions of Americans from food assistance , and the numbers are still growing. She points to our current unemployment insurance system as an example of how administrative hurdles prevent people from collecting benefits they are owed.

"Unemployment insurance is a contributory benefit. You have to be paying into a trust fund in order to get it," she says. But, she adds, some people don't collect unemployment, either because they can't figure out how to complete the paperwork or "the state, frankly, can't figure out how to deal with all of the paperwork that it's receiving."

In addition to lost benefits, Lowrey says living with such a time tax contributes to what she calls a "low-trust society."

"When the government treats us like this, we don't trust it. And if we don't trust it, we're not going to trust it to do more and better things for our life. And I think that it leads us not to trust each other, too," she says.

On the administrative burdens faced by the Americans with the greatest need