The Time Tax
Metadata
Highlights
- But at some point, I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the âtime taxââa levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them. This time tax is a public-policy cancer, mediating every Americanâs relationship with the government and wasting countless precious hours of peopleâs time.
- The government rations public services through perplexing, unfair bureaucratic friction.
- little attention is being paid to making things work, rather than making them exist. And very little attention is being paid to making things work for the neediestâpeople short on time, money, and mental bandwidth. The time tax needs to be measured. It needs to be managed. And it needs to end.
- The safety-net and social-insurance programs are perhaps where the time tax is most pronounced, most purposeful, and most deranged. But the problem is broader. Fragmentation, complication, and individualizationâwhereby citizens become responsible for the administrative work of the stateâare persistent features of American life.
- The difference is so significant that, as shown by the Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler, many high-income people, unlike poor folks, never even realize they are benefiting from government programs.
- application processes than programs used disproportionately by white Americans.
- It also creates the need for businesses, charities, legal-aid groups, and civic-technology organizations to perform public administration on behalf of the government;
- Finally, it needs to take responsibility for the time tax. Congress needs to pump money into the civil service and into user-friendly, citizen-centered programmatic design. And the federal government needs to reward states and the executive agencies for increasing uptake and participation rates, while punishing them for long wait times and other bureaucratic snafus.