Why governments waste your time

 

“The Time Tax. By Annie Lowrey. Ecco; 352 pages; $32 and £32

 

When Jeff Miller, a writer from New Jersey, moved to Massachusetts, he was denied a driving licence for being a felon. But he was not a felon. He had been confused with another Jeff Miller, born on the same day in the same state.

 

So he applied for a letter confirming that he was the non-criminal Mr Miller. This required his original paper social-security card, which he had lost, and his original paper birth certificate, which meant asking his mother. After weeks of hassle he got his letter and thought the problem was solved. But when he moved to Oregon, the same thing happened. Then he was detained at an airport. Why, he wondered, do I have to keep proving I’m not the other Jeff Miller?

 

His travails are a symptom of a wider problem. Governments often treat your time as if it had no value. As monopolies, they know you cannot shop elsewhere for a passport or permit. So whereas it takes only one click to have Thai food delivered to your door by a private firm, the form for people in Michigan seeking public support until recently had 1,000 questions, many in impenetrable bureaucratese and some pointlessly intrusive (such as “what is the date of conception of your children?”).

 

America is not the worst offender. But as Annie Lowrey describes in “The Time Tax”, it is unusually bad for such a rich country. Americans spend five times as much time on government form-filling as Danes, Brits or South Koreans.

 

Whereas the much poorer and more numerous citizens of India all have a digital biometric ID , Americans are still shuffling paper.

 

Wasting the public’s time is a bipartisan sin, argues Ms Lowrey, a top-notch journalist at the Atlantic. Cold-hearted Republicans want to make it hard to claim benefits, she writes, so “they obsess over fraud and use it as a justification for making programmes impossible to use.” Micromanaging Democrats “love too-complicated-by-half means-tested measures, like tax credits for rural broadband users. They load straightforward initiatives up with so many conditions and choke-points that they fail to deliver.”

 

The government can act quickly when it absolutely has to. When covid-19 struck, Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” helped drug firms produce a vaccine in seven months—a process that would normally take a decade or more. This is less than the time the authorities in San Francisco spent pondering one application to open an ice-cream shop, without ever reaching a decision. The applicant, Jason Yu, spent $200,000 trying to answer objections from NIMBYs and then gave up, having nearly been bankrupted.

 

Ms Lowrey thinks American red tape owes a lot to historical racism. Starting with the pensions paid to civil-war veterans, she describes how white people suspected black people of trying to bilk the public purse, and demanded onerous checks to prevent fraud. This is part of the story, but a more basic problem is that America is the longest-surviving democratic system in the world. Whereas revolutions have torched old rules in other places, America has been steadily accumulating them for 250 years, like an ageing hoarder whose home is packed to the ceiling with vintage junk.

 

The health-care system, for example, is multiple systems piled on top of each other. A tax break for employer-provided health insurance dates back to 1943 (when it was a way for firms to dodge wartime wage controls by offering perks). Medicare (a straightforward but ruinously expensive programme for the old) and Medicaid (56 insanely complicated programmes for the hard-up) began in 1965. Obamacare, an attempt to cover the millions who slipped through the net, was passed in 2010 and sabotaged by Mr Trump in 2017.

 

Today Americans who lose their jobs often lose their insurance. To get Medicaid, they must complete forms that “contain impossible-to-parse instructions, request absurd amounts of data and devolve into Proustian and at times terrifying digressions”. One woman describes to Ms Lowrey what it is like trying to navigate this maze when you have lost your job and insurance because of a brain injury. (“Freaking horrible.”)

 

Each time-wasting rule has a lobby to defend it, so efforts to cut the time tax have disappointed. Elon Musk’s DOGE did not try. Joe Biden did, shaving 35m hours from the time gobbled up by welfare paperwork in 2023.

 

However, the overall burden of red tape grew by nearly 50 times as much, reaching a record total of four and a half working days per year, per American.

 

For inspiration, Ms Lowrey visits a country that was able to start from scratch. Estonia escaped from communism in 1991. The old order was swept away, and many of its enforcers went back to Russia. This allowed a team of young technocrats to create the most joined-up, user-friendly digital government on Earth. For most Estonians, “it takes less time to file a tax return than to microwave a bag of popcorn.”

 

In America, by contrast, the tax code is so confusing that most taxpayers have to pay for professional help to file their returns.

 

This is absurd. Most people’s financial affairs are so simple—a salary and some bank interest that the government already knows about—that an Estonian-style platform could save them money and time. Mr Biden launched a pilot scheme to simplify tax-filing that proved popular with users but terrified lobbyists for the tax-prep industry. Mr Trump killed it.” [1]

 

1. Why governments waste your time. The Economist; London Vol. 460, Iss. 9518,  (Sep 26, 2026): 77, 78.