Annie Lowrey on the Time Tax, Fraud, and Rationing by Paperwork

Annie Lowrey's new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you're poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don't work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption.

So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity's role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she'll learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded September 1st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:58 - On taxing our time

00:19:47 - On private-sector time taxes

00:22:57 - On AI eliminating paperwork

00:25:03 - On immigration as a filter

00:28:49 - On reducing fraud

00:33:03 - On federalizing bureaucracy

00:35:12 - On breaking up New York

00:36:25 - On making voting easy

00:38:28 - On updating universal basic income

00:41:29 - On banning exotic pets

00:42:13 - On deserts and moss

00:43:18 - On beautiful brutalism

00:43:50 - On tattoo culture

00:44:38 - On Christianity after Christianity

00:48:29 - On escaping the global monoculture

00:51:42 - On the time tax of friendship

00:54:49 - On what comes next

00:55:43 - Outro