“The Time Tax” and Higher Ed

Annie Lowrey’s new book, The Time Tax, is a terrific piece that I nearly threw across the room.

The book is an easy read, but it took me multiple sittings to finish because so many of the examples are so maddening. Lowrey examines picayune and seemingly arbitrary forms, requirements and planned impositions on people’s time as exercises of power. Unsurprisingly, that power is exercised in uneven ways.

For example, the forms that many states require people to fill out to receive disability benefits are far more onerous than, say, the requirements to take the mortgage interest tax deduction, even though the latter costs the government far more. Applicants for food stamps are scrutinized in ways that people who benefit from classifying their income as capital gains are not.

Lowrey makes the obvious yet often overlooked point that for many low-income people, nearly every encounter with the government is hostile. Their neighborhoods are policed aggressively. They are subjected to random drug tests when working and when not. Wait times to get questions answered, whether in person or on the phone, are often intolerably long and may require missing work. And the people in the offices are often responding rationally to the incentives they’ve been given; giving benefits to those who don’t “deserve” them is sanctionable, but denying benefits to those who do is just how the cookie crumbles. Benefits programs are held accountable for overspending, but not for underspending.

Much of the time tax is rooted in distrust. The Calvinist streak in American culture that insists on distinguishing the worthy from the unworthy, or the deserving from the undeserving, leads to all manner of “verification” requirements reflecting distrust. Given American history, that distrust is allocated unevenly along lines of race, class and sex, though we all bump into it at times. The income tax is a clear example. It’s so absurdly complicated that many people feel it necessary to pay other people to fill out the forms for them; they wind up paying for the privilege of paying taxes. (Lowrey contrasts our system to some European countries that simply send out postcards with taxes due on them. People can appeal, but most don’t, and the time saved is substantial.) I pay for access to a software package to allow me to do it myself—if using software counts as doing it myself—but even with that, it takes several hours and generates enough frustration that the family has learned to stay out of the room while I’m doing it.

The reductio ad absurdum of the unholy marriage of Calvinism and bureaucracy, of course, is means testing. Over the last few decades, legislators terrified of bad press around “undeserving” beneficiaries of programs have flocked to means testing as a sort of insurance against embarrassment. It’s also a poison pill guaranteed to prevent effectiveness.

Those of us in higher ed know how this works. We’ve all had—or been—students whose income was too high for help, but too low to make ends meet. That might be because of fluctuating income, recalcitrant stepparents, job changes or aid packages that simply don’t keep up with need. At that point, programmatic failure becomes a personal problem. (The broader systemic fix of providing enough institutional aid to keep college affordable in the first place is considered politically extreme.) If you wanted to generate cynicism toward public programs, you couldn’t design a much better way to do it.

If public libraries didn’t already exist and someone proposed them now, they’d be shot down as socialist. But can you imagine the nightmare of libraries with means testing?

To her credit, Lowrey suggests some reasonable steps toward solutions.  One is to drop the simple-minded and inaccurate distinction between small and big government. Social Security has markedly low overhead compared to other benefit programs because it isn’t laden with all manner of surveillance requirements, and because it’s a single program across the entire country.

In fact, much of the kudzu of bureaucracy is intended, ironically enough, to keep programs small. Replacing “targeted” benefits with universal ones—and state benefits with federal ones—would benefit more people, and would do so with lower overhead cost. 

Lowrey’s previous book, Give People Money, proposed a universal basic income as a low-overhead alternative to the panoply of narrowly targeted programs we have now; that spirit endures in this book, too.

Most of us have intuited at one time or another that bureaucracy is about power. It’s heartening to see analyses that start to take the issue seriously. (Don Moynihan and Jennifer Pahlka have done excellent work recently along similar lines.) Getting the diagnosis right makes room for actual solutions. What would it look like if we started from trust rather than distrust? It’s hard to imagine, which is a sign of just how bad the problem is. Universalism would be a great start.