2026-09-25
31 分钟This is In Conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shumita Basu.
Today, the hidden government systems that steal your time.
Think about the last time you had to deal with a government agency.
Maybe it was renewing your driver's license, filing your taxes, or applying for Social Security benefits.
Chances are, it was in some way deeply frustrating.
Endless paperwork, a janky online portal, hours spent on hold.
Americans spend billions and billions of hours every year trying to navigate government bureaucracy.
And researchers have a name for this hidden and sometimes demoralizing toll: the time tax.
The amount of time, effort, emotional work, sometimes money that is put on the consumer, the citizen.
That's Annie Lowrey.
She's a staff writer at The Atlantic
and the author of the new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It.
She argues that all of this red tape is more than just annoying; it has real, lasting consequences.
So I wanted to talk with Annie about where we feel the time tax most
and her ideas for how to fix it.
Well, let's just start by defining what the time tax is.
You break it into three sort of categories, right?
Yes.
So this schematic comes from two amazing scholars, Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd.