In a conversation with journalist Annie Lowrey, we discuss her new book focused on the “time tax” imposed by bureaucracy and what it actually costs Americans.

I have spent years working alongside mothers who are doing everything they can to provide for their families while navigating systems that often make that work harder. Through the Magnolia Mother’s Trust , I have seen how the cost of poverty is not only financial. It is also measured in time, energy, dignity and the endless paperwork required to receive support.

That is why Annie Lowrey’s new book, “ The Time Tax ,” resonated so deeply with me. In this conversation, we discuss why people with fewer resources are asked to spend so much time proving they deserve help, how the social safety net sucks people into a paperwork vortex and what it would mean for the government to actually place a value on people’s time.

Nyandoro: You were one of the first journalists to take guaranteed income seriously as a major economic and social policy idea. You were reporting on it around the same time that I was developing the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, but your new book takes us beyond the question of whether people have enough money and asks us to think about what poverty costs people as it relates to time. What made you want to focus on time?

Lowrey: I remember when I was a young reporter in Washington, D.C., meeting with a group of veterans who were homeless and living in the city. At points, they were unsheltered. We say as a society that if you are willing to put your life on the line for your fellow citizens, if you are making that degree of sacrifice, we are going to take care of you.

Yet they were just a couple miles from the VA building and could not access what was on offer because accessibility was not designed for their needs. At that point, not everyone had a smartphone. These were people who may not have had all their paperwork in one place. They could have been dealing with substance-use issues and certainly the strain of homelessness itself.

Once I started seeing this issue, I saw it everywhere. If you are waiting two hours to vote, struggling to register because you cannot find the right information, trying to get your kids signed up for a low-cost after-school program or spending 20 hours doing your own taxes every year, those can look like isolated policy problems. But in my mind, they are all one policy problem.

I came to think of it as a system of corvée labor . The government is requiring a tax of time and effort from people. Some administrative burdens may be unavoidable. To get something, you may have to do a little work. But so much of it is excessive, purposefully demeaning, purposefully demoralizing or set up in a way that someone with a law degree would still struggle with it.

What are most of us supposed to do if we do not have a law degree and are also worrying about whether we have enough diapers for our child or how to care for a parent who needs managed care? I see this as a place where the state is failing. There are a lot of things we could do to fix it, but we are not doing them because we do not think about the problem in this way.

Nyandoro: I can get on my phone and, while I am talking to you, apply for a mortgage. If I can accomplish all of that through technology in five minutes, why can we not simplify these systems?

Lowrey: Absolutely. I wanted to make clear in the book that this is not just a matter of saying, “Poverty is hard.” When we think about our lower-income neighbors, there can be a posture of, “That is sad. That is too bad.”

Instead, I want to say that this is happening to all of us. This is an injustice. That injustice is not equally applied or equally burdensome for everybody, but everybody should be mad about it. That includes higher-income Americans and people with advanced degrees. They should be angry that the government is doing this to their neighbors and fellow community members.

I wanted to shift it away from the idea that this is an unfortunate thing happening to marginalized people or people for whom we have historically not made things easy. This is everybody’s problem. We should all be angry. It is an injustice.

Nyandoro: For those who have not had an opportunity to read the book, you call it a time tax. What do you want people to understand about what that tax actually looks like in someone’s everyday life? Why is it so much more consequential for people living with fewer resources?

Lowrey: When we think about government bureaucracy, we tend to focus on the agencies, the number of civil servants, the laws they are administering, the processes and whether they have enough offices or phone lines.

What I want to do is focus on the experience of the people being bureaucratized. That is citizens and residents. That is all of us.

Lower-income people are paying a higher time tax in a few ways. Policies for high-income people tend to be delivered automatically and often through the tax code. If you are getting a 529 savings account for your child to go to school or a home mortgage interest deduction, you take a number from the form your mortgage lender sends you each year and put it into your tax return. If you have enough income, you may also have an accountant doing your taxes for you.

You do not have to pee in a cup. You do not have to comply with a work requirement. You do not have to show up at an office. There is no question that you will get that deduction if you have mortgage interest and itemize.

If you are a lower-income person, you are probably dealing with more programs because we have many programs rather than a single program for lower-income Americans. Those programs do not talk to one another, do not share data and do not have the same income standards or rules. You have to apply separately to each one and maintain that eligibility every year.

The burden is also amplified because people with lower incomes are often already time-stressed. They are thinking about whether they are working enough to put gas in the car. Life is harder. You are already more stressed out. There is research showing that living in poverty is the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter.

You may be worrying about whether your four-year-old will have enough to eat. That is very different from wondering whether you will get a couple hundred dollars a year or a few thousand dollars that might allow you to retire a little earlier. It can be life or death.

Having a lower income should be morally neutral. Some of us have higher incomes and some of us have lower incomes. But we do not extend that neutrality to certain people in the way that we do to higher-income Americans.

Nyandoro: How did doing research for this book change or deepen the way that you think about what it actually means to be poor in America?

Lowrey: We still have this idea, and it has become even more prevalent because of H.R. 1, that if you are working, public-benefit requirements should not be a problem. The bill created a national work requirement in Medicaid and expanded work requirements in SNAP. The argument in Washington was that this is not a cut because people will meet a simple requirement, like 80 hours a month, or qualify for one of the protected classes.

But you cannot eat Medicaid. You cannot sell it. You cannot do anything with it except access medical care. We knew from other studies that a work requirement was not going to change people’s decision to work. And even if a low-income person refuses to work, which is very rare, I still think they deserve health care. How is it better for them not to have it?

Our social understanding of the root causes of poverty has changed tremendously. Twenty or 30 years ago, most people would say a person is poor because of their own decision-making. Now, people are much more likely to say poverty is due to the labor market, intergenerational poverty or community disinvestment. They see it as a social outcome that we could prevent.

But our understanding of paperwork has not updated. I did not realize just how much time it takes lower-income people or how frustrated they get. When people choose not to grovel for $200 a month through a particularly burdensome program such as TANF, I understand that as a completely rational choice. Would I choose to feel humiliated in front of the state for $200 a month? You have to scale it up for your own income, but it is a rational decision.

Nyandoro: I have been saying for years that the people I work with who choose not to get TANF and other resources are doing a cost-benefit analysis. They have decided that the return on investment of their time and dignity is not worth what they are receiving in return. I always applaud them for that because I want them to recognize and take back their power.

You tell a beautiful story in the book about a woman who is working, going to school and raising her family while repeatedly trying to get the paperwork done to qualify for the support she needs. How should we think about the economic value of the invisible work mothers are doing to keep their families afloat? What does it say about our country that mothers with the fewest resources and limited time are often the ones asked to spend the most time navigating systems that are supposed to help them?

Lowrey: Mothers and women are the majority users of the most burdensome programs in American life. Often, those programs are designed to help their children.

We have said societally that children do not choose their parents. I certainly believe, and I think most Americans believe, that no child should be in poverty. Not here in the United States, in the richest society the planet has ever known. A child should not be held responsible if their parent is not great at paperwork or if life has been hard and it is particularly difficult for them to apply for these programs.

Women are more likely to be single parents and are often household and family managers across the income spectrum. They do more of this work. When we think about work requirements, we are often thinking about men. We do have exemptions for parents of younger children in a lot of programs, but we still do not fully understand that women are often doing this work.

There can be a sense that women are simply household managers. They will figure out the school uniforms, make sure there are lunches and make sure the child sees a pediatrician. Instead, we should think: Mothers are already taking on this enormously important social role. Should we not make it easier for them? Should we not reduce their stress and give them more time, especially if we are going to have a countrywide discussion about fertility rates and whether we have enough kids?

We also need to think about the intersectional burdens. In mixed-status families, women are often handling the paperwork. Black women and Black communities have historically had a much more administratively complicated identity in American life. People who are sick or live with a disability may be beneficiaries of public programs, but we are also saying to them that they have more paperwork to do. That is really hard.

Nyandoro: I love this term you use of a “paperwork vortex.” Why have we accepted this as normal? In the richest country in the world, we are having all of these conversations about AI and technology and how we can make our lives easier and more efficient. Why have we accepted this as the norm? For those of us who recognize that it is a disrespect to all of us, why are we not challenging it?

Lowrey: Marcella, the woman you mentioned earlier, is a manicurist, a mother and someone who is working very hard. She is entrepreneurial. She wants a middle-class life for herself and her children, and she is working to get it. She has earned certifications and put herself back into a school program.

About eight or nine years ago, the salon where she worked had classified her as a 1099 worker and overstated her income, which changed her benefit eligibility. She said, “They overstated it. I did not get that money.” But she ended up being labeled a fraud risk and paid a correction to the state.

She was never charged with a crime. The issue was a minor administrative problem. This was not a legal issue. She was not accused of or tried for fraud. But the systems can claw benefits back and penalize people. The paperwork was difficult, and she did not know how to hire a lawyer to make the argument that the nail salon was the one that had made the mistake.

Ever since then, she has had to reapply every month or two instead of every six or 12 months. That has been very difficult. She uses Medicaid and SNAP. She had been on TANF but timed out. There is no real way to challenge it. What is she going to do? Go to the state or her social worker and say, “This feels unfair?” She has no power in relation to the state.

Until recently, she did not have a computer. Someone donated a laptop, and it was the first computer she had. She was doing all of this on her phone, including faxing documents from her phone. It is a terrible way to operate.

Higher-income people often care less because their accountant may be dealing with the problem or because they simply interact with the state less. If they decide a school system or regulation is not working for them, they may be able to move, change states or hire people to help. They may not feel the same social solidarity with their neighbors.

We also have so many programs administered at different levels of government that we do not see this as a unified problem. We see it as an issue with Medicaid or Medicare, voter registration or the DMV. But these things should be tied together. We are giving the government $8 trillion a year, and it is giving us terrible service delivery.

Technology has not made these systems simpler. I hope AI will change things, but I am also skeptical. Not everyone is using sophisticated AI tools. People may not feel confident giving their Social Security number to AI systems.

Nyandoro: One of the things you talk about that struck me is that people with money can often buy back time. They can pay someone to handle their taxes, navigate bureaucracy, provide child care, arrange transportation and solve problems. People with fewer resources have to do that work themselves. How much of economic inequality is really about who has the ability to buy back their time?

Lowrey: This is one of the ways inequality is so perverse. We know lower-income Americans wait longer in waiting rooms. They have more paperwork to do, and it takes them longer. This all happens within an atmosphere of greater risk.

For a high-income person, it can be a rounding error on a net-worth calculation. For a lower-income person, it may determine whether they will be housed next month, whether they can pay their rent or whether they can feed their children.

I think a lot about interest convergence theory, which is the idea that things often happen in American life when people with political power feel personally affected by something. Derrick Bell wrote about this in asking why the country got the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 after decades of advocacy in the Jim Crow South. His theory was that white men in Washington were being embarrassed in international negotiations and by other countries asking how the United States could claim to be a democracy when so many citizens could not vote.

Here, the ability of higher-income people to hire someone to deal with taxes or avoid interacting with the same systems as lower-income people can erode social solidarity. They do not see themselves as operating in the same system as their lower-income peers because they are not.

The way we design benefits for higher-income people also matters. Suzanne Mettler has research showing that higher-income people can receive high-value government benefits without understanding those benefits as benefits. They are described as tax relief. People may say, “The government does not do anything for me,” but the system is hiding the support from them.

I have never met a low-income person who does not know what help they are getting from the government when they apply for WIC or similar programs. But if you have a 529, you may never notice it in the same way.

Nyandoro: My husband and I had a conversation about our children’s 529 account just last night. We know it is there, but we probably need to check in on it. You are right: It is an invisible structure that we benefit from without really thinking about it. It is easy. You set it up, the system does the math and tells you how much will come out of your check. You do not have to reapply or sit before someone who is questioning whether you are doing the right thing or whether you should be doing more.

Maybe this is the biggest question underneath both of your books: What would it look like to build an economy and a social safety net that actually trusts people? What would it look like if we trusted people with their own lives and gave them not just enough money to survive but enough time, agency and breathing room to build the lives they want for themselves and their families?

Lowrey: It is a great question because I think a lot about what we are doing at the outset. Americans want to work. They want to get to the middle class themselves. They are deeply interested in ensuring their children have a great education and their parents have a comfortable retirement. I am always amazed by how judicious and responsible so many Americans are.

We should be thinking about high minimum wages, low-cost college, excellent public schools, affordable housing and lower costs for groceries. People do not want handouts. They want fair play and an economy that works for them. They want access to the middle-class life they are building for themselves.

When we are talking about government, we should create a government that sees our time as valuable. Businesses constantly put themselves in the shoes of consumers when they are selling products to us in a frictionless way. Government should create processes around the needs of the individual instead of the needs or processes of the state.

That means treating all of us as it treats higher-income people receiving the home mortgage interest deduction. It means making programs automatic, allowing them to communicate with each other and doing the hard work to take this burden away from people so the government does it instead.

You can have an enormously complicated set of programs and requirements. Just make the government do the work, not the individual. But this is much harder if we do not have a fair economy that delivers good wages, affordable homes, excellent public schools and an environment in which the middle class can flourish.

I think about this in terms of universal basic income. For many people, living only on a Universal Basic Income would be a catastrophe. We want to work. We want to use our ingenuity. We want to build something. We do not simply want a handout.

But if we are giving the government $8 trillion a year, it should deliver benefits back to us in a seamless, elegant fashion. We should all demand more of it.