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In 2001, writer Jeff Miller walked into a Massachusetts DMV to transfer his driver’s license and walked out as a convicted felon.
At least according to the government.
Miller had never been arrested. But as journalist Annie Lowrey explains in her new book, “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It” (Ecco, out Aug. 25), another Jeff Miller had been born on the same day, in the same state, and later committed crimes “in the penumbra of attempted murder.”
To prove he was the non-murderous Jeff Miller, he had to gather his original passport and birth certificate, replace a Social Security card he could no longer find, and get New Jersey to issue a letter confirming that, as Lowrey puts it, “Jeff Miller was not Jeff Miller.”
The letter worked, until it didn’t. Oregon’s DMV later flagged him. Border officials detained him after a trip to Canada. Airbnb suspended his account because it doesn’t rent to violent felons.
“It would be nice if they would take the effort to figure out that I am not actually Jeff Miller, who is a felon, instead of putting the onus on me,” Miller told Lowrey.
That onus is the subject of Lowrey’s book. She calls it the “time tax” — “a levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on Americans in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs.”
Americans pay it when they file taxes, renew a license, appeal an insurance denial, apply for food assistance, or seek a building permit. Federal estimates show Americans spend more than 12 billion hours a year complying with government paperwork requirements, Lowrey writes. That is nearly six eight-hour workdays for every US adult. The American Action Forum values that labor at roughly $430 billion annually.
The problem begins with the sheer sprawl of American government. Lowrey counts at least 91,476 governments, from the federal government down to school districts, towns, tribal governments and special-purpose entities, each with “its own rules, policies, procedures, and budget.”
“Somehow, we all live in a continent-spanning DMV,” she writes.
But the burden is not shared equally. “Time taxes comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted,” Lowrey writes. Poor, sick and disabled Americans often face the most paperwork at the moment they have the least time, money and energy to complete it.
Marcella Patino, a Utah single mother of three earning $300 a week, relied on Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance. Her caseworker requested documentation nearly every week, Lowrey reports. Patino had no computer and struggled to navigate the state website on her phone.
“It takes me hours,” Patino told Lowrey. “Sometimes, if I submit an application to one program, it messes up the whole entire other set. Then I have to go back and fix all of it.”
When Patino changed jobs, Utah mistakenly recorded her as holding both jobs at once and dropped her from Medicaid. She learned about the error in the emergency room.
Lowrey calls this a “paperwork vortex,” where overlapping programs, constant verification and official mistakes turn “getting out of poverty [into] the job of the impoverished.”
Some of the book’s bureaucratic demands are so invasive they sound invented. Michigan once required struggling residents to complete a benefits application that ran more than 40 pages, contained 18,000 words and asked more than 1,000 questions. It asked applicants for their weight and hair color. If a single applicant was pregnant, it requested the date, city, state and country where her child was conceived.
“I cannot comprehend why Michigan would ask for this information,” Lowrey writes. “Nor can I imagine that many parents were able to provide it.”
But bureaucracy is not an immutable law of nature. In Estonia, nearly every public service is available through one secure digital portal. Its “only once” policy means that when a resident gives information to one government office, other agencies can retrieve it. Most Estonians can file a tax return in less time than it takes to microwave popcorn, Lowrey reports.
She acknowledges the comparison is imperfect. Estonia has fewer people, simpler programs and less generous benefits. But Michigan managed a dramatic improvement without moving to the Baltic.
In 2018, the state replaced its notorious benefits application with a version containing 80% fewer words. The average completion time fell from 40 minutes to 16. Successful applications rose from 72% to 94%, while government processing time dropped 42%.
“It worked,” former Michigan health official Robert Gordon told Lowrey. “It worked to get more people their benefits, faster.”
Lowrey’s conclusion is that Americans should not have to become better amateur bureaucrats. Government should stop outsourcing its administrative work to the people it is supposed to serve.
As she writes, “We’ve got to reclaim our time so we can spend it on things that are truly important.”
