This Is Why People Hate the Government

28:03Where your kid was conceived. It's not conceived. Doctors don't ask you that. This is the state telling 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. You are asking for help and they're like, oh, where was your kid? 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 telling you when it asks you that? It's also just a kind of you go through this form.

28:51It's it's very intimidating as a form. It's hard to read. It's hard to read. It's like it's enormous. It tells you a lot that if you like I'm just looking at the front. It's like if you don't give correct information. I mean, what if you get the conception date wrong? I look at something like this, and here's my question for you about it. Is the way you understand this form that the government here was incompetent, 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?

29:27This is a government with exquisite sense of what the time tax can do. This is a government weaponizing the time tax because it does not want people to complete this form because it wants you to get it. And its view of you is if you're asking us for help, you should pay. And if you can't pay with money, if we're going to have to support you, then you better really need it. And the way we know if you really need it is if you will subjugate yourself before us, if you will humiliate yourself in this way. And that it, you know, in this telling, right, not my view, acts as a virtuous disincentive to people going on the public doll.

30:07I 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, OK, what do we feel like we need from these people? What are the legal requirements? What, given our processes, do we need?

30:49This 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 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 H.R. 1, which is currently rolling out, which is applying a nationwide work requirement in the Medicaid program. This is the one big, beautiful bill. One big, beautiful bill act. So, yeah, describe that.

31:24So the main pay for, which is not pay for all the tax cuts, but pays for some of them, are work requirements in Medicaid and SNAP. Yeah, it extends them in SNAP. SNAP already has work requirements. Which is food stamps. Yes, food stamps. The modern name for it. And so there's some just straightforward SNAP cuts. So refugees and asylees get cut from the program in some cases. And then in SNAP food stamps, it takes the work requirement and it extends it to some categories that didn't have to comply with it before. Older Americans, for instance. But then what it does is it takes the Medicaid program.

32:02And just stop for a second. Medicaid is not a cash benefit. You can't do anything with Medicaid except forget health care. So the idea that you would get Medicaid and you would stop working or would just be living on the dole is kind of silly, right? But for the first time ever, it is applying a nationwide work requirement to non-disabled adults in the Medicaid program. And that is the engine, the cash engine driving tax cuts for the wealthy, not because those people are not poor enough to get on Medicaid, but merely because most of those people will not be able to comply with the work requirement because it's so onerous.

32:54This is a I want to stop here, both because it's a good example and because it's a really massive policy change about to go into effect. Yes, huge. You try to think about this. It's like, what is Medicaid for? 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've got to be really poor. 138 percent of the federal poverty line, which is really low. and either cannot find a job or cannot get it together in a way where they can work their way through the paperwork and continuously prove that they're looking for a job in the right ways and different states are going to implement this and places will implement this in different ways with different levels of difficulty for the people they are testing.

33:46What about society's improved if that person now has no coverage when they have a heart attack? Beats me. And they're going to go to the ER and it's going to be uncompensated care that somebody will pay, just not Washington. So will the individual pay because they're not going to get treated for that health condition that they have. I think about this all the time. I'm a type one diabetic. No insulin. I'm dead in a couple of weeks. I don't know, maybe longer. And you are creating this burden where many people on Medicaid are already working if they can. Notably, they just don't make enough or they don't have a job, like a nice fancy job like we have that comes with health insurance.

34:30Right. Or they can only get, you know, a part time job or whatever. They have caretaking responsibilities. These are not generally people who are just like sitting at home, not working. And they're not people who have other health insurance options for the most part. I mean, the thing that I always thought was the most telling about this move was that it was not done on its own. You could imagine a world where they did like a big Medicaid reform package and they decided we want to have work requirements and they thought about how to implement them. I would oppose that like all the way through.

34:59Yeah. But it was telling that this was done to get savings. So richer people get tax cuts. Absolutely. And there was this tremendous, you know, Donald Trump promised that he wasn't cutting Medicaid. Right. This is going to be easy to comply with. And what we're going to do is we're going to get people like they kept on citing young men, young men who aren't working to get Medicaid. We're going to get them to work. We're also the cheapest people to insure. 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.

35:40There'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? Because 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.

36:19So yes, as you were saying, this does not work unless it kicks people off. And they said it wasn't a cut. They said they're not cutting. But how are you going to get a trillion dollars from the program without cutting? I would also note that the predominant recipients of government benefits, they're always saying it's about the young guys who don't want to work. They're women. Women who are much more likely to be taking care of kids, much more likely to spend a lot more time doing that, much more likely to be the person who is managing the household. And I think that there is a lack of integrity.

36:53I think it'd 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 that serves an indigent, mostly homeless population of folks, many of whom have a substance abuse problem. And these people, the treatment that they often need is inpatient psychiatric treatment and then wraparound supports to help them get stable. And we know that that is the best way to help them. That is often what they are seeking.

37:36That is the care that they get. They're all going to lose their insurance because they're not going to be able to comply with this. They don't have phones. They don't have computers. How are you supposed to comply with a work requirement if you're sleeping in a tent? One of the things that people are very well rewarded for in modernity 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.

38:11You're laughing at me because you're describing yourself. I hew to a tasselus. 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. 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. 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.

39:03That makes it hard to do the things that society rewards you for. Things that come very naturally to other people. We pretend that people are all successful because they either worked hard or they didn't. And everybody knows it's bullshit. 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 they just have trouble navigating modernity. They have depression. They have anxiety. They have other health issues. And then you begin to pile bureaucratic procedure on them, pile forms you have to fill out, forms that routinely I get in late or that you get in late.

39:50That I get in late. To go back to one thing you were saying before, yes, I think that high-income people have often a completely different orientation towards this kind of paperwork. And I really like the Bernard Suits idea of having a loosery attitude, right? The loosery attitude is what makes a game a game. Arbitrary rules and this like, OK, I'm going to try and win. And this is the attitude that many high income people bring to like, for instance, a college application. Yale is going to make you spend 100 hours on the application. You're like, oh, that's another place where I can achieve, right?

40:28This is a meritocratic idea of, you know, the harder you work, the better a boy you are, right? Or if you have high-priced accountants, high-priced tax preparers, it's a game you're trying to win. We've talked about this, that sometimes you meet a very high-income person in our line of work, and the degree to which they talk about tax avoidance, they really talk about it all the time. like kind of getting off on it yeah exactly um and you know and i think that we can both take this sort of and it's actually it's not just pure shit it's elizabethan idea of there's deserving and undeserving and we're going to separate these two i think that importantly in the united states this has to get filtered through the prism of race right the reason that we do not have these kind of universally accessible simple benefits is anti-black racism uh right a lot of these big programs are set up during Jim Crow.

41:24I know that this sounds kind of overly declarative, but I don't think it's 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, that believe in TANF, that believe in all kinds of tax credits and hands up and all the rest of it is twofold. that one, fraud is a real problem. Yeah. And two, that even just politically, if you believe in these programs, if they develop a reputation for helping people for whom that help is not deserved, the program will be destroyed, right?

42:08This is function of what happens to welfare, right? We have TANF because the view was, and this was racialized and this was wrong in many cases, but it was wrong in literally every case, that 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. Yep. So what about the arguments, you know, that actual policymakers make for doing things this way? I think it's important when you're thinking about the shift from AFDC to TANF. So this is what happens in 96. Old welfare to. Old welfare to new welfare.

42:47And 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. Which is crazy to high income people, I think, where it's almost always like you meet the criteria, you're going to get it. 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. But if you're eligible for Section 8 vouchers, you may not.

43:18Yeah, you might, you know, and you or you might wait 10 years, 12 years. Right. And it might not be obvious to you why some people are getting it. And some it's often, you know, not entirely obvious to the people within those organizations either. I would note. But 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 the the program that comes like way earlier is this mother's pension program which is used almost it's run at the state level it's used almost exclusively by white women in which you you know if you were a good widow or a woman who had been abandoned and you had kids, you would have kind of a social worker come and it was very paternalistic.

44:09But, you know, it was supposed to be wages for being a mother and doing the most important work in American life. This is like an old progressive era of policy, right? But then when you get ADC, which then becomes AFDC, this is complicated part of Social Security because it's an entitlement, 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 media conception of the program. Whenever they show images, there's a really great study by Martin Guilens showing that whenever they show images, they're not showing white women anymore.

44:53Even though Black women are never a majority user of the program, they are never, They still aren't. 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.

45:30So I would just note that I think that when you are thinking about fraud, it's really important to think about 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, OK, we're going to look at your tax returns and figure out if you actually get this. We're not going to have asset tests and all these other little kind of fussy, finicky things. There would be fewer people getting overpayments, underpayments, inappropriate payments.

46:11I would note that we have not a great sense of how much fraud there is in these programs. We have an improper payment error rate, 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.

46:47Fraud is both real. And whose fraud we choose to care about is telling. Who does a lot of the Medicaid and Medicare fraud? Doctors. Or the heads of large organizations like Rick Scott, a senator from Florida who ran a, I believe it was a for-profit hospital organization that was one of the largest fraud that had to do one of the largest fraud settlements with Medicare in history. Yeah. Separately, Donald Trump. You got to be real fancy to do a big Medicare fraud. Donald Trump pardoned, pardoned or commuted, I don't remember, but did one of the two. I'm somebody who had settled on the largest fraud cases with Medicare more recently.

47:24You do have real fraud on the part of individuals. On the other hand, Trump and the Republicans gutting the IRS audit division has made fraud a lot easier for high income taxpayers. You know, they are not going after Medicare and Medicaid fraud in the way they could. But I mean, there are a lot of ways 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 got it. It's buying fake. It's buying like leaked information online and using that to apply for unemployment insurance.

48:08Criminal groups. It's, you know, and you do. I mean, in Minnesota, right? Like the kind of small ring frauds, 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 piss tests, how many people would get would get their benefit revoked for that? I wonder if you had to do this form instead of like ticking a single box that actually your accountant is doing because you don't do your own taxes.

48:43You know, well, this goes to maybe the time tax and also like a good place to see the choices we're making that the most people interact with in America, which is the tax system itself. Yeah. So this is part of the book. 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. that you do by text message. Norway, sorry to the Nordics. Do they all look the same to you, Annie?

49:35I'm just, I can't remember which one. I'm so sorry. The Danes are over here and they're like, it's not us. And in many other peer countries, they'll just send you a form that's mostly filled out and you can figure out if you want to do any changes and then maybe you sign it, you send it back. It is like risible. You know, when Europeans are like, wait, your health care 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? Pardon? 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.

50:26And 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. 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. The The reason the IRS can come after you fill out your taxes and say you underpaid is because they know how much you're supposed to pay. 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.

50:58And then you're like, OK, 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. And people liked it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Direct file. It was great. There's two things. There's two things here. So one is that the U.S. tax system is so complex. There are so many write-offs and kind of arcane, fussy little provisions that do require people to tell the IRS. But most people, that's like not true for. Most Americans take the standard deduction, which means that you're not itemizing things. It's 9 and 10 take the standard deduction.

51:38The second is that there's legal prohibitions on data sharing between U.S. government agencies. So HHS might have some information on you. They can't send it to the IRS very easily for the most part. These systems don't talk to each other. And very often in other countries, they do. And for a lot of Americans, the idea of having a government that has a unitary repository of all of this information and it's all connected is really terrifying. We have very little social trust, and I think correctly, why would we? However, you can always give people the option. Make it a permission. I want the government to fill up my taxes for me.

52:30I want the government to search for benefit programs and then go get the data from the state tax office in 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 want to stop here because one of the moments in the book where you said something that just like stopped me a little cold was you went to Estonia. I remember when you went to Estonia.

53:07You didn't tell me much about that trip. So I read about it in your book. And you talk about Estonia's only once policy. Yeah. Like this was so utopic. Yeah. That it's almost hard to read about it. What is the Estonia only wants policy? So Estonia creates a government de novo, not that long ago. Right. Post-Soviet. Yeah. They get their independence back. And it's all really young people that are not that this is the most important thing, but I do think it's interesting in the history. Often the people who are putting a government together in their 20s and 30s, a lot of them are not actually retirement age now.

53:53And or just barely retirement age now. And they are extremely poor. They are financially distressed. They need foreign investment and they need the support of institutions like the IMF. So they want 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 like technologically advanced government, I think, perhaps on Earth. Almost certainly. Yeah. Like at least in terms of service delivery. Yeah. And they have this policy that if you tell any part of the Estonian government a single piece of information, I had a kid, I switched addresses.

54:48You 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 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?

55:28And 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. But it's not it's not the IRS. It wants you to know. It is Republicans. 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, although they are a little bit in the pocket of big tax preparer. Like Intuit and others have done a lot of lobbying on this. Yeah, these companies lobby so heavily.

56:03It's a big industry now. 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 going to want more government. Totally. And Republicans don't want you to want more government. And so it creates this kind of. Kind of don't they now? Right. They want government for some people. There's a whole thing about Donald Trump. But they don't want a fishy government. Although I will say about Doge. One of the things I just remember thinking about with Doge, you and I talking about, is a number of times when I would.

56:35I'm going to walk out of here. when I'd be reporting on the way social benefits worked or something. And I would run into all of these privacy considerations in the government. We can't do the obvious thing because the IRS won't share any data. 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?

57:07Congress. 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. constructively. But one thing they really showed was a lot of things that, say, the Obama or Biden administrations treated as sacrosanct. Those were guidelines. Those were recommendations from your lawyers. And maybe it's worth it to start breaking some guidelines and rewriting rules in order to make the government work better. There's a deeper issue here, which is that Congress does not see itself as the administrator of anything.

57:48You know, my view is Congress should get rid of the filibuster and then when Democrats are in power, 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, 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. Take away presidential power and think of a prime minister. It's going to be really popular. The SA wants to abolish the Senate.

58:20This 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 arguing for a simpler but bigger and more national government. Yes. 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 going to get into them. Yes. Medicaid, federalize it. UI, unemployment insurance, federalize it.

59:01TANF, if you're going to have it, federalize it. any program yeah this is my bumper sticker is like i hate laboratories of democracy the federal government is better at doing this they are for a few reasons one they don't have balanced budget requirements right 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 going to have doing the same work type question. There's 56 Medicaid programs. Yeah. What happens when you move? Yes. It's a constant. It happens all of the time. And if you're like housing insecure, you move a lot.

59:41Yeah, totally. And I think that there is a floor that so many state and local programs sink below that that seems like a much more important issue to me than laboratories of democracy that actually go above and beyond and have great benefits. Although it's very interesting to me that it's not necessarily blue states that have better administration than red states because they're under the same constraints. Right. So they're also often so highly proceduralized in government. Oh, my God. 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.

1:00:21They've gotten better on some fronts, but it's just it's not like a simple, you know, the more liberal. It doesn't map on like that at all. It really, really doesn't. But yes, if you could take these programs and federalize them and make it such that the agencies administering them were responsible for outcomes and saw themselves as a service delivery organization, yes, it would be a lot better. It would be way better.

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1:02:47Your first book was about universal basic income. Yeah. And when I got to the end of the zone, I came to think these books were more connected than I had thought when you were writing it. Oh, totally. They're twins. 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.

1:03:18we 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 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 the 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, but do it better. He had some problems.

1:03:53Cambodia, I'm not a huge fan of. Yeah, no, 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. Indeed. 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 CTC. and it reaches 80 % of target families, the IRS administers it instead of some welfare agency somewhere, what does it do? It cuts child poverty in half. And granted, that's mostly due to just the sheer amount, the giant money cannon, but the administrative simplicity, I think, is actually important there.

1:04:37Most 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. But the IRS and Congress, I guess, is that then people don't notice, you know, there's amazing research by Suzanne Mattler of Cornell that shows that high income people, 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.

1:05:17I 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 of this paperwork and everything. So I do think that there is this kind of downside to tax programs, which is that, you know, they become invisible. But look, they're way easier for the government to administer, way cheaper. And you're much more likely to get them to the people who you want to get them.

1:05:56You 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 this whole story from the Biden era where Biden was like, I'm not going to put my big signature face on a check like Donald Trump. It's like you should have put your big signature on the check like Donald Trump. Yeah. So what do you say to conservatives? Because I've seen this case pushed against your book. It's like, look, this is a great description of how government fails. It is a great description of government complexity.

1:06:29It is a great 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 fundamentally paradoxical. Government should just do less and be more out of people's lives and not take away so much of their money. 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 governments around the world work.

1:07:13We 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 going to use that. And who needs that for us? 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 not a program exists, but not really whether it's accessible.

1:07:58Totally. 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 their experts on these programs. And we don't listen to them either. They aren't like people who are stakeholders. It's not like, you know, you have 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 going to listen to you?

1:08:28You're not allowed to speak out. You'd get fired. No. Can't go write an op-ed from the, I mean, I know through you how many people you talk to in the bureaucracy who are just like hair on fire, like funneling you information about how it doesn't work. Oh my gosh. 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. Yes. 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.

1:09:05Jen Palka, I think, has like the greatest, you know, exegesis of this idea in recoding America. Author of Recoding America. Yeah. Guest of the podcast. Last guest for the show. Right, where she describes it as this like bureaucratic anxiety cycle. So what happens is, you know, Congress spent 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, OK, well, here's in an even more specific way.

1:09:45what 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 I've thought about this before. Mine is actually simpler, fairer, faster. I feel like Democrats should run and they're going to say the government will be simpler, fairer and faster. And they should actually make that happen. They should make the policies simple. They should make them way less corrupted by money. They should actually pass and try to pass, in fact, a constitutional amendment on money. And they need to make them faster.

1:10:18Right. Abundance is a lot about speed. This book has a lot in the end about speed, too. 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. And that means it's simple to use. It treats them fairly and respectfully and they get what they need from it fast. So their time isn't taxed. Yeah, absolutely. I think that this is a great way to do it.

1:10:54The 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.

1:11:37But 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 you a million, you know, pieces of paper and all this time to just like get a very basic business license. That's great and almost like kind of like Republican politics. And I think that, you know, could that politics work for people? I think so. I think it'll be very interesting to watch what people think of Medicaid after the work requirement comes in, because I can guarantee you that the stories are going to be about people who can't get cancer treatment.

1:12:16Marginal 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? And this is going to kill people. And so I don't think that it's going to be more popular for the Medicaid program. And so there's this piece of political science research that actually showed that administrative burdens do not just make recipients less likely to engage civically. they kind of sour entire communities on the government because they're like, wait, why are you treating us like this?

1:12:52And, 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've wondered whether or not the Trump Medicaid and SNAP work requirements are going to create an opening. I mean, when Republicans cut government sharply, they often create the conditions for a politic sense of expansion because people 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 the possibility to do something.

1:13:27Now they've decided to do a massive cut that's going to hit many of their voters, many Trump voters on Medicaid or on SNAP. It's going to hit them in very unpleasant, complicated ways, and I think give the opposition an opportunity to make this kind of burden on issue and not just sort of argue for, you know, expansion or restoration of funding, but actually say, like, this is not what your relationship with government should be. This is not what government should do to you, make it easier for rich people to cheat on their taxes and harder for you to get Medicaid. I think that that's absolutely true.

1:14:06I'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 6%, which like 40 states have a, again, improper payments, not fraud rate, improper payments rate above that, it makes them pay for part of the benefit, which they've never had to do before. And I'm very concerned that states will not be able to do this, and they will not have the money to cover it, and they might just not have SNAP. I've talked to hospital administrators and state legislators who are like, what are we going to do when Medicaid gets gutted?

1:14:43How are we going to keep hospitals open? They are going to destabilize whole health systems. I think that they might drive doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists out of the profession. They are creating a mass administrative burden, a mass time tax, the like of which we have never seen. 96 TANF reform, like that was so tiny in comparison to this. Much smaller program. Almost 25 million people. They're sapping billions of hours of people's time to give money to rich people. Yes, I would hope that this would create an opening for actual root to stem reform. But I think that you could develop a politics of this.

1:15:28And 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 little moment of imagining nice things uh always our final question what are three books 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 books that we mentioned to each other constantly so one is the book that has changed how i have read every memoir, every autobiography since. I'm not saying it's a good book.

1:16:10I'm saying it's a deranged object that I think everybody should read. And this is a book called My Silent War by Kim Philby. So Kim Philby is a spy, prominent British spy, and he almost becomes the head of MI6. He's a Soviet agent. He's a Soviet agent. And he eventually defects to the Soviet Union and drinks himself to death in Moscow. And, you know, I think that there was perhaps some expectation of like a warm reception there for all that he had done for the Soviet cause. But of course, the Soviets don't trust him. He's a liar, right? He just spent his whole life letting the people that he grew up with, the people that he worked right next to, right?

1:16:55Like sending them home in body bags to their widows. And 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 Greene because they actually knew each other because Graham Greene was a spy. John le Carré. I don't know what is in John le Carré'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 The second is the book that I consider.

1:17:53Annie really mentions this book a lot. She's not lying about this. Kim Philby comes up constantly. World historical piece of shit. What a world historical piece of shit Kim Philby is. The second is a book that I consider most insightful about politics and political thinking. And it is neither of us are sports watchers, but 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, you know, this famous football JK rivalry. Sorry. It's basketball. It's about the offsides rule. And yes, it's about basketball.

1:18:34Sorry. 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 12 miles of each other is kind of one of the fun parts about it. And then my third hobby horse book, which I think people talk about this book all the time, but I feel like a lot of people have never actually read it, is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. It will blow your hair back. The reason that we don't laugh, I'm a huge listener of Manosphere podcasts along with yours.

1:19:15I'm a really big listener of Joe Rogan. And the reason I bring it up all the time is I'm like, has Joe read Gender Trouble? Because wow. I mean, he's camp. This is not like an original point of mine, but he has such a fascinating conception of masculinity and it's enacted in such a wonderfully camp way. And this is such a take. This is obvious. I'm not saying it's wrong. This is like table stakes. Have me on Joe Rogan. I'd love to talk about paperwork with you. Paperwork and your performance of gender. Yeah. I would watch that episode of Rogan. I think it's beautiful. I really, really do. I think it's really, really interesting.

1:20:02And 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, Ray, like you learn what gender is by enacting gender. And by this iterative process of emulation, of putting on the muscle T and. These books are kind of all the same book. These are all the same book. Yeah. These are all this. This is why I brought them together that I'm like, if you want to understand psychology, don't read. Well, I don't know. You don't think your way into actions. You act your way into thoughts. Exactly. These are all the same book in very different ways, in very, very different ways.

1:20:46Annie Lowry, thank you very much. Thank you.

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