This Is Why People Hate the Government

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/f66cc4f621bde280


One of the big problems in left politics.
Is it 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.
are 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 it oftentimes their experience with the government?
It's horrible.
Their experience with government programs meant to help them.
It's 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 Lowry is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
She's the author of the new book The Time Tax, which is all about this.
She's also my wife. We are married, so we talk about this a lot at home.
She joins me now.
Annie Lowry, welcome back to the show.
Thank you for having me. So I think people might imagine that I know.
Everything about this book?
Yeah. 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. Oh gosh, no. And it's also
We have very different like work habits. So I write almost exclusively between like ten PM and four A. M. Which is when you are sleeping and getting up to meditate because you're like a normal person. So I feel like there's a real ships in the night quality to all of those. Yeah, so this is a huge opportunity for me.
So to finally find out what this book is about. Yeah, no, it it comes out shortly, so I'm glad that you'll finally be acquainted with it. So I want to start simply.
Yeah.
What's the time tax?
The time tax is the burden
Uh
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 end user. So it's basically
Thinking of bureaucracy's effect on the people who are being bureaucratized.
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. Yes.
What do you mean by control there?
These things seem neutral.
There's this understanding, right, if you're gonna get something, there's gonna be some
Mm.
But
These are
Not
Infrequently.
Purposeful.
They are designed to make people
feel good about themselves and their relationship vis-a-vis the government or feel bad about themselves and their relationship.
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 gonna be so hard to get that a lot of people aren't gonna 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 are 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. See if you're taking drugs. 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 at cost cost.
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. A tool of humiliation. 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 valence they come with this
Financial valence and then they come with an emotional valence too.
You have a a good line in the book where you say
Poverty is a social construct, not just a material state of being.
And the time tax is part of its construction with forms, summonses, 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.
ads and and you say it this way in other places, like a part time job.
Yeah. Right. You're already behind. You're already struggling with the basics of life.
And now you have to do all of
This. You've been reporting with someone in Utah.
It's like I feel like is a very good e example of this. Do you wanna talk through that?
Yeah.
Um
Marcella.
Is
A single mom of three kids, and she's a manicurist.
And so she's 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'd 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 nine years ago.
And
She 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 a hundred and twenty times.
A hundred and twenty 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? But it's still just a lot of time. I mean you have this scene where she's being helped by I think the at least in part social workers and they're just befuddled in front of their computer.
Yeah. It takes hours and hours and hours. And she doesn't have a computer, right? 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 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.
'Cause she needed to do that.
And she's like, How do I how do I do this thing? And I'm like, Why do you gotta why do you have to send anything as a fax?
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.
And it's time she can't spend working her way out of poverty, being a mother. Doing anything. Working on her nail business. Yeah, exactly.
I I just always think this is such an underrated the 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.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah, like we've people have like
done this, they have looked at it, they have done all kinds of experiments. It's equivalent to pulling an all nighter.
And it's just constant.
like thinking about things and mental weight and it just makes it harder.
The poll.
out that if the point of the state was to make it easier to not be poor,

these states I believe the way you're gonna do that is wrapping people in procedure and humiliation. It's exactly the opposite.
The like
Whoop.
You need to make it easier for people.
Yes. Like if you're poor it's
fucking hard enough.
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 nineteen eighties that basically in government programs
You wanna make'em a bit of an ordeal and what that is gonna do.
is that is going to get people who don't really need the benefit not to get it.
Right? It's gonna discourage them.
Um, and it's also gonna help you protect about against fraud. It's gonna, 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 gotta 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.
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 ninety six.
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.
But so then what happens in ninety six? 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.
Ninety six.
Uh
The program is required to have work requirements.
It's required to have sanctions
For non compliant users.
of the program. The time limit.
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 ten years later, like you're not gonna get TANF, 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 sixteen point five trilli billion 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
in 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.
for the people who are receiving the money
They have to do so much work to get this really paltry 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

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 adminute what I'm gonna tell them.
about one of the hardest things that happened in my entire life. And so noncompliance with the child support rules, which again, I think they have a fine theory behind 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 gonna claw your benefits back.
Um, depending on the state, are sanctioned for that one policy alone.
And Tan if now.
Is so
Ineffective.
That it does not actually
Change the child poverty rate.
It has no effect on it.
This 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
That it doesn't actually do anything.
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.
Yes.
And the programs where where where we treat them.
Intuitively or by default. Right. The government does. Right.
with suspicion. They they have to prove themselves worthy.
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
Government um
Operation.
They just decided.
Everybody is worthy.
of getting their mail delivered.
Mm-hmm. No matter where they live.
A
Art project, I guess.
By Steven Brower?
Mm-hmm.
Um at New York's
uh school of visual arts. Can you just talk about that and talk about
The post office is a kind of counter example here.
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 typefaces 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. Are they like shading and occluding 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. Like I think like those boats that you do
This
They deliver mail by mule to the base of the Grand Canyon?
Who who lives at the base of the Grand Canyon and has 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.
But this gets to the question.
Of
Deserving und deserving.
We have decided.
you're deserving of getting your mail delivered. Even if you live somewhere.
Medicare. You turn sixty five.
That's it. It happens pretty easily. And we were talking about this in in the team as we were preparing for this and and one of the questions
Some thing well, it's like well that's easy'cause it's just when people are are are
getting to retirement age, but no, these social security in the sense that uh you get different amounts depending on what your income has been, what you've paid in, Medicare has multiple programs within it. So why are they?
easy. Is it like a lack of administrative complexity in figuring out who it is? Or is it
Something else.
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. Yes. Regardless.
There's this idea that yeah, if you don't earn social security, you're not gonna get social security.
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. 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?
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.
Um
Is this work by
Joe Sauce 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
Um
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.
One of the
Parts of the book I found very moving is
In the latter half you you you tell these two stories and
One of the people is she works for sort of a boutique real estate agency.
Mm.
And she gets a a bad head injury. Yep.
And she's treated, she ends up in what you describe as like a paperwork vortex.
Yeah.
But
Is she and her family sort of react to that as an injustice. Yes. Like they I don't know what their income background is, but but clearly
They're not used to being treated this way by the state. She's college educated. She's college educated siblings are college educated, yeah. And you compare it
Uh
Someone who doesn't come from that.
And how much are just like, yeah, this is the way the state treats me.
But it it reminded me and 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. And they sort of think there's just a a strange, like a false consciousness there, it's all culture issues.
But oftentimes working class voters have terrible experiences with the government. Awful. 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 experience with the government, you think, Oh, redistribution, it's gonna be great for everybody. Yeah.
But then if you've been on the business end of redistribution sometimes.
It has maybe been really
humiliating and time consuming for you. 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 or voting against their own self interest, right?
Yes, the people who are middle class, who are college educated I've 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.
Uh
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 were 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 ooh, I'm visiting an American embassy abroad parts. You're getting the standing in line and pea in a cup.
Hearts.
You're getting the I'm gonna humiliate you.
I'm gonna treat you like you're a fraud risk.
But then again, there are some parts of the government that even high income folks deal with that are absolutely miserable. They just have more capacity to handle it.
I'd asked you uh
Before this.
If you had a favorite
Time tax. If you had a favorite form of a thing that
exemplified what you're talking about here. And and so maybe it's a way of illustrating
what we're actually describing.
Um you said you did. What is it?
The DHS eleven seventy one. Oh, of course.
Um
There is uh 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 eleven seventy one in his pocket, like a little miniature version of it. You meet the most interesting people. I do, I do. I'm an 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
Eighteen thousand words.
And a thousand.
Questions.
A thousand questions. A thousand questions.
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 Brown and his organization Sevilla helped to redesign it.
But until recently this was the form
And
I have it, if we want to look at it. Love a prop.
Okay.
So this is on
Kind of like two sided.
So it's actually kinda smaller than it
You know.
This is heavy. Yeah, it is heavy. Um it's really hard. You can look at it, it's like it's hard to read. It's like do I have to do all of this? Oh my God.
So look at I've not seen this one before.
This is a lot of boxes.
It's terrible.
If this person is under 22, complete this section.
Who paid for this child's birth expenses, state, parents, another person, what was the marital status of the mother while pregnant with this child, if married or divorced, marriage date, separation date?
Divor state, 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 named someone as a father?
Where your kid was conceived.
Doctors don't ask you that.
This is the state tell poor people to go fuck 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. What day was your kid conceived? What day was your kid? I don't know what day our kids were conceived. Nobody does.
That's not like a thing. And
What is
The state tongue you
When it asks you that.
It's also just that kinda if you go through this form.
It's
It's very intimidating as a form.
It's hard to read. It's hard to read. It's like it's a normal. 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?
I look at something like this and and and here's my question for you about it.
Is the way you understand this form
that the government here was
Incompetent.
Rule.
Bound.
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 gonna 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.
Um
And they did
You know, in in this telling, right? Not my view.
Axis A
Virtuous disincentive to people going on the public doll.
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. But so you're saying the 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. All of the above.
And I think that we have a great example of this in HR one, which is currently rolling out.
Which is applying a nationwide work requirement in the Medicaid program. This is the one big beautiful bill act. 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 SNEP.
Yeah, it extends them in Snap. Snap already has work requirements. Which is food stamps. Yes.
And so uh there's some just straightforward snap cuts.
So refugees and asylum's get cut from the program in some cases.
Um
And then in Snap food stamps it
Uh 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 forget healthcare.
So the idea that you would get Medicaid and you would stop working
Or would just be living on the dole is kinda silly.
Right?
But for the first time ever
Uh it is applying a nationwide
work requirement
To non disabled adults.
In the Medicaid program.
And that is the
Engine.
Them 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.
This is a uh
I wanna
Stop here because
Both because it's a good example and because it's a really massive policy change about to go into effect. Huge.
You try to think about this. It's like what is Medicaid for?
Yes. We think people should be able to have health care even if they're poor.
Yes.
So now you imagine
A person.
Who is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Yeah. And you gotta be really poor. A hundred thirty eight percent of the federal poverty line, which is really low.
And
Either.

Find a job.
Yep.
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 gonna implement this and places will implement this in different ways with different levels of uh
difficulty for the people they are testing.
Yeah.
What is what about society's improved if that person now has no coverage when they have a heart attack? Beats me. And they're gonna go to the ER and it's gonna be uncompensated care that somebody will pay.
Just
Not Washington.
So will the individual pay because they're not gonna get treated?
For that health condition that they have?
I think about this all the time. I'm a type one diabetic.
No insulin, I'm dead.
In couple weeks, I don't know, maybe longer.
And
You are creating this burden where uh 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 now 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. Yeah.
But it was telling that
This was done.
To get
Savings. So
Richer people get.
Yes, absolutely. And there was this tremendous
You know, uh Donald Trump promised that he wasn't cutting Medicaid.
Right. This is gonna be easy to comply with. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna get people like they kept on citing young men, young men who aren't working to get Medicaid. We're gonna get them to work.
Yeah, they don't really use a lot of health care young men, generally, 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 clusterfuck 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?'Cause oftentimes if you are, you know, 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 gonna get a trillion dollars from the program without cutting?
Um, I would also note that the predominant recipients of government benefits they're you know
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 figure out how to get
insurance in some other way.
That is a terrible policy, but at least it's honest.
This
This isn't honest.
And I was talking with somebody who runs a health clinic
Uh, that serves in
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 gonna lose their insurance.
'Cause they're not gonna 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.
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 You're describing yourself. Um I I'm I I Hudotas, it's 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.
I think one yes to the first and no to the second.
Yeah, I think it exists someplace in time and space. I've literally talked to my therapist on the phone and we have opened the mail together.
So
Good good insight there. Good insight there.

If
You don't have that.
Right.
If
For all kinds of reasons. You know, people have addiction issues. Yes.
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. Yeah.
That makes it hard to do the things.
that society rewards you for things that come very naturally to other people. Um we like pretend that people are all successful because they either worked hard or they didn't. And everybody knows it's bullshit.
Yeah.
And the things also that help you work hard and that make you a compulsive worker, you often don't choose those either.
And
So you take somebody who is already struggling with this and maybe that is part of why they are poor.
Because like they just have trouble navigating modernity. They have depression. They have anxiety. Yes. They have other health issues.
And then you begin to pile.
bureaucratic procedure on them. Pile forms you have to fill out.
Mm-hmm.
Like
Routinely I get in late or the
Totally. That I that I get in late.
To go back to one thing you were saying before, yes. I think that high income people have a
Often.
A completely different orientation towards this kind of
Paperwork.
And I really like the the Bernard suits
Um
uh idea of having a losery attitude, right? The losery attitude is what makes a game a game.
Arbitrary rules.
And this like, okay, I'm gonna try and win. And this is the attitude that many high income people bring to like, for instance, a college application. Yale is gonna make you spend a hundred hours on the application. You're like, oh, that's another place where I can achieve.
Right. The harder you work, the the better a boy you are, right? Or if you you have high priced accountants, high priced tax paypayers.
It's a game you're trying to win.
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.
Yeah, exactly.
Um
And you know, and I think that we can both take this sort of and it it's actually it's not just purity, it's Elizabethan idea of there's deserving and undeserving, and we're gonna 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.
Uh right. A lot of these big programs are set up
During Jim Crow.
It's wrong.
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.
Yeah.
That believe in TANF, that believe in all kinds of
tax credits and hands up and all the rest of it.
is twofold.
But
One fraud is a real
Problem.
Yeah.
And two, that even just politically.
If you believe in these programs, if they develop
A reputation.
Yes. For helping people
For whom that help is not deserved.
Right. The program will be destroyed, right? This is functionally what happens to welfare, right? We have PANF 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 um welfare reform is 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.
So what about the arguments?
You know, that
Actual policy makers.
make for doing things this way.
I think it's important when you're thinking about the shift from AFDC to TANF. This is what happens in ninety six. Old welfare to 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.
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. Mm-hmm.
Um, which is crazy to high income people, I think, where it's almost always like
You meet the criteria, you're gonna get it. Yeah, if you have a mortgage, you get the mortgage interest deduction. Yeah, they're not shuffling around who gets it and who doesn't.
eligible for section eight vouchers. You may not Yeah, you might not, you know, and you or you might wait ten years, twelve years, right?
And it might not be obvious to you why some people are getting it and some 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. Uh the originator
uh the the program that comes like way earlier is this mother's pension program, which is used almost exc 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.
Uh in American life.
This is like a old progressive era policy, right?
But then
Uh
Uh 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, yeah, they use the program.
And the entire program
Becomes about
you know, the the media conception of the program, whenever they show images, there's a really great study by Martin Guylin 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 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 oh okay, we're gonna look at your tax returns and figure out if you actually get this.
We're not gonna 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 it?
Fraud is both real.
And whose fraud we choose to care about.
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. Donald Trump pardoned, um pardoned or commuted, I don't remember, but did one of the two. Somebody who had settled one of the largest fraud cases with Medicare more recently.
You you
You do have real fraud on the individu on the part of individuals. On the other hand
Trump.
And the Republicans getting
The IRS Audit Division.
has made fraud a lot easier for high income taxpayers. Mm-hmm. You know, they are not going after Medicare and Medicaid fraud, um in the way they could. I mean, there are a lot of way like the biggest frauds
Come from organized
Actors.
Both legitimate and illegitimate. Yeah.
who are able to
Do kind of complex frauds that are not about
Like putting the wrong name down on a form. Yeah, it's unbundling services. It's complicated. You gotta buy fake it's buying like leaked information online and using that to apply for unemployment and criminal groups. It's you know, you know, and you do I mean in Minnesota, right? Like the kind of smaller inflaws which are real, whereas organizational.
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 PIS tests, how many people would get
Would get their benefit revoked for that, I wonder.
Mm-hmm.
If you had to do this form instead of like ticking a single box that actually your accountant is doing'cause you don't do your own taxes.
You know?
Well, this goes to maybe the time tax and also a 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. Yeah.
So th this is part of the book.
Uh
How does our tax system work from this perspective?
And how could it?
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 by text message.
Norway, sorry.
The Nordics. Do they all look the same to you, Annie? I'm so sorry. The stands are over here and they're like, it's not us. And uh
In many other
Pier countries.
They'll just send you a form that's mostly filled out.
And you can
Figure out.
If you wanna do any changes and then maybe you sign it, you send it back.
It is like risable. You know when Europeans are like, Wait, your healthcare system works how?
You got billed 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? Like, w 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 to do it. 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.
They do. So the reason the IRS can come after you fell out your taxes and say you underpaid. Yeah.
is because they know how much you're supposed to pay.
Yeah. And given that they know how much you're supposed to pay, they could just tell you how much you're supposed to pay.
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. And people liked it.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh. Direct file. It was great.
Yeah.
There's two things. There's two things here.
So when
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.
Nine and ten.
Take the standard deduction.
The second
Is that there's
Uh
Legal
Prohibitions on data sharing between US government agencies. So
H H S 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 correct.
Please?
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 low income 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.
So I wanna stop here.
Because one of the moments in the book where
You said something?
They just think
Stopped me a little cold.
Wiz
You went to Estonia.
Uh I remember when he went to Estonia.
You didn't tell me much about that trip.
So I read about it in your book.
Ha ha ha ha.
And you talk about Estonias only once.
Policy.
Yeah.
Like
This was so
Yeah.
Topic?
Yeah. That is almost hard to read about it. What what is the
Estonia.
Only once policy.
So Estonia creates a government de novo.
Not that long ago.
Right? Post Soviet.
Yeah.
They get their independents 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 twenties and thirties, a lot of them are not actually retirement age.
Now.
Yeah.
And uh or just barely retirement age now.
And
Uh
They are extremely
Four.
They are
financially distressed, they need foreign investment.
And they need the support of institutions like the IMF.
So they want 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. Almost certainly.
Yeah.
Like at least in terms of
Service delivery.
Yeah.
And uh they have this
Poly
That if you tell
Any part of the Estonian government a single piece of information.
I had a kid.
I switched addresses.
Yeah.
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 it like.
You know, your your educational records, right? Like
It's 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 it's not the IRS that wants you to do your own taxes it is Republicans in Congress. It's not Congress. It's Republicans. Yeah. Because republicans forever have wanted taxes to be hard, so you hate the government. Yeah. And it's not just because they're in the pocket of like big tax preparer.
Yeah.
Although they are a little bit in the pocket. It's a big it's a big so heavily. But if every time you meet the government
It is smooth.
And seamless.
And you walk away thinking that government's pretty great.
Yeah. Then you're gonna want more government.
Totally. And Republicans don't want you to want more government.
And so it creates this kind of don't they now? Right? Like they want government for some people. But they don't want a fish in government. Although I will say about Doge.
One of the things I just remember thinking about with those.
You and I talking about is a number of times when I would be when I'd be reporting on the 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.
Look, one way or another, guess who gets to change laws?
Congress.
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. But one thing they really showed was a lot of things that, say, the Obama or Biden administration's
treated as sacrosanct. Yes. Those were guidelines.
Those were recommendations from your lawyers. Yes.
And
Maybe
It's worth it.
to start breaking some guidelines and rewriting rules in order to make the government work better.
There's deeper issue here, which is that Congress does not see itself as the administrator of
Anything. You know my view is Congress should get rid of the filibuster and then when Democrats are in power, 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.
And that's how democracy is supposed to work. 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 on the bumper sticker. Right? Like take away presidential power and think of a prime minister.
The SA wants to abolish the Senate.
This is the moderate position now. Yeah.
The thing you're really debating in this book, pretty explicitly, is the federalization of powers. Yeah.
That you do not like.
How many
programs are state administered. 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.
Things should be federalized. What do you want to federalize?
Oh my goodness. So there there are some constitutional issues here.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm not gonna get into them. Yes, Medicaid, federalize it.
UI unemployment insurance.
Federalize it.
Tanf, if you're gonna 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.
This is actually like a really big thing.
States and cities.
Do.
The second is just like a simple
Who like how many agencies are we gonna have doing the same work type question? There's 56 Medicaid programs. Yeah, what happens when you move?
Yes. It's a constant rate. Like it happens all of the time. If you're like housing insecure, you move a lot. Yeah, totally.
And I think that there is
uh a floor that so many state and local 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'cause they're under the same constraints.
Right?
And they're also often so highly proceduralized or in government that they're less effective. Like you often have like more generous benefits.
In a much more complex bureaucracy. 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, said
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.
Your first book was about universal basic income. Yeah. And

I came to think these books were more connected than I had thought when you were writing 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. 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. Yep.
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.
Excellent president up until
The government should do fewer things would go better. He had some problems Cambodia, I'm not a huge fan of. Yeah, no, no. I'm not I'm not here to rehabilitate Richard Nixon. There's a lot of things to be concerned about there. But a fascinating figure.
But
Th that seems like the kind of thing you're
envisioning here.
Yeah, look at the child tax credit, right? So the child tax credit exists. There's this brief moment during the pandemic.
Where they give a really big C T C
And it reaches
Eighty percent 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 canon, 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 it then people don't notice?
You know?
Um
there's amazing research by Suzanne Matler of Cornell that shows that high income people
Uh, no matter how much they're getting in government benefits, they're always like, Well, I don't use any government program. And 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
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. 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.
Absolutely.
I remember there's this whole story from the Biden era where Biden
Like I'm not gonna
put my like big signature face on a check like Donald Trump. It's like you should have put your big signature and check like Donald Trump. Yeah. So what do you say to conservatives,'cause I've seen this um
case pushed against your buck. 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 dis description of government incompetence, which you agree is at least part of the story here. Oh totally. So ending in a stirring call.
For bigger government.
More government.
is like fundamentally paradoxical. Government should just do less and be more out of people's lives and not taking way so much of their
Do they want to take away social security?
Some of them do. 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 government's
Around the world.
Work.
We have low standards.
We're letting these assholes get away with murder. I mean it.
There's no constituency for this right now. It's a thing I think about all the time.
There's no kind of way to say, hey, when you're creating like a partially refundable tax credit something, something that's like means tested, like that is stupid and you shouldn't do that because you're asking a lot of people and nobody's gonna use that and who needs that fuss.
And I think that we should. We should say, Hey
We're paying you to do this.

You take seven trillion dollars a year.
Be competent.
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.
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're experts on these programs, and we don't listen to them either.
They are 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 statutorily not allowed.
You'd have to get a law passed, you'd have to get a regulation passed. Who at the White House is gonna listen to? You're not allowed to speak out. You get fired. No.
Can't go right in 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. Oh my God. But nobody wants to make government programs work better than the people who
are held back from administering them correctly. Yes. Like if you've devoted your life to getting people Snap and now you are not able to get people Snap, it
Drives you crazy. 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 Palka
I think has like the greatest
you know, exegesis of this idea in recoding America. Yeah.
Guest of the party.
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.
We were talking earlier about our government bumper stickers and and I thought about this before.
Mine is actually simpler, fairer, faster.
I feel like Democrats should run.
And they're gonna say the government will be
Simpler.
Fairer.
and faster. And they should actually make that happen. They should make
The policy's simple.
Mm-hmm. 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 two.
And
I think when people talk about making government efficient, it doesn't mean anything.
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. Yeah.
But
You want the government to be efficient from the perspective of
The person it benefits.
It's simple to use.
It treats them
Fairly and respectfully.
and they get what they need from it.
Fast.
So they're
Time isn't taxed.
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 Zoran Mamdani in New York.
has had this whole, you know, like
If you're a small business, it shouldn't
Take 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.
'Cause I can guarantee you that the stories are gonna 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 gonna kill people.
And so I don't think that it's gonna be more popular for the Medicaid program.
And so um this is
Piece of political science research.
That actually showed
That administrative burdens do not just make recipience
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?
I wondered whether or not the Trump
Uh Medicaid and
Snap work requirements are gonna
create a an opening. I mean, when Republicans cut government sharply
They often create the conditions for a politics kind of expansion because people don't like the effect of the cuts. We've seen this happen many, many times before.
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 gonna hit many of their voters. Many Trump voters on Medicaid or on Snap.
It's gonna 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.
Mm-hmm. 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.
Totally.
I think that that's absolutely true. I'm 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
six percent, which like forty states have a again improper payments, not fraud rate, improper payments rate above that, it um 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 gonna do when Medicaid gets
Got it.
How are we gonna 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've never seen.
Ninety six TANF reform, like that was so tiny in comparison to this. Much smaller program. Almost twenty five 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 root 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.
Can you imagine how nice that would be?

It'd be really nice.
I cannot.
I think that's a good place to end.
Little moment of imagining nice things.
Uh, always our final question.
What are three bucks?
You would recommend to the audience.
So
While I was thinking of the books to recommend to the audience, you and I had created this list of
Uh
Books that we mention to each other constantly.
So one
Is the book that has changed how I have
Red
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
Uh
Spy
Prominent British spy.
And uh he almost becomes the head of M I six.
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.
And you know, I think that there is 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 Greene was a spy.
John LeCurae, I don't know what is in John LeCaree'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 skepticism.
But um so that's one of my books, which I think many of your readers would like. The second is the book that I consider. Kim Philby comes up constantly. World historical piece of shit. What a world historical piece of shit Kim Philby is.
Second is a book that I consider most insightful about politics and political thinking, and it is Neither of Us Are Sports Launchers.
But uh it is a book about sports. It is about UNC and Duke. It is called To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe. I bring this up.
Constantly.
And it is about
Um
You know, this famous football
JK.
Rivalry.
S
Basketball.
The offsides rule.
And yes, it's about basketball. Sorry. Um by Will Blythe. It's really, really beautifully written.
But this
book is about, right, like how
Habits.
How acting this rivalry out
Like inculcates
the rivalrous mindset that's all occurring within people who live within like twelve 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 we 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?
'Cause 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 this is such a take. This is obvious. I'm not saying it's wrong.
This is like m table stakes.
Have me on, Joe Rogan. I'd love to talk about paperwork with you. Paperwork and your performance of gender.
Yeah. I would watch that.
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 m muscle tee and these books are kinda all the same book, these are all the same books. Yeah, you these are all the same this is why I brought them together that I'm like if you want to understand psychology, don't
We
Well I don't know that. Exactly. These are all the same book.
In very different ways.
In very, very different ways.
Annie Larry, thank you very much. Thank you.