Annie Lowrey explores the administrative burdens people face applying for government benefits. It's not just about wasted time: "When the government treats us like this, we don't trust it," she says.
Page F4From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Americans needing help pay in hours and paperwork; the tax code lists 614 reasons the rich don't
As it ran on the front
Two filings, same week, hon. The first comes from people trying to get help they qualify for — paperwork, lines, hours on hold, what one accounting calls a 'time tax.' No dollar figure attaches to that tax. It's paid in hours: hold-music hours, mailed-form hours, missed-shift hours, the kind of hours that don't show up on any 1040 but come directly out of a paycheck all the same, because an hour on hold during a shift is an hour not worked.
The second filing runs the other direction. It counts, not hours, but reasons — 614 of them, by one tally, why the tax code doesn't collect from the wealthiest filers what the marginal rate on paper says it should. Six hundred fourteen entries: carve-outs, deferrals, valuation methods, the ordinary architecture of a return that never generates a hold-music problem, because none of it requires a phone call. It requires an accountant, filed once, effective every year after.…
…(cont) Run the two ledgers against each other. One column charges in time, collected from people who by definition need help most, meaning people already working the hours that leave the least room to spare more. The other column charges in nothing, collected in the sense that 614 reasons is a way of saying 614 places the collection didn't happen. Both are the same government's arithmetic, applied to two different populations, in the same fiscal year.
Nobody designed the time tax to appear on any budget line, which is the point — it's not appropriated, it's absorbed, by the person on hold. And nobody wrote the 614 reasons into one bill, either; they accumulated, the way sediment accumulates, one favorable ruling and one grateful lobbyist at a time. Neither system required a vote to reach the totals it's at now. Reconcile the two and the finding isn't complicated: the cost of needing help is measured in hours you don't get back, and the cost of not needing it is measured in reasons you never have to give. File that discrepancy under 'who the paperwork is for,' and move to the next entry.
“One column pays in hours on hold, the other pays in loopholes nobody has to explain to a customer service rep — six hundred fourteen of them. Figure out which line you're standing in, because they built two different systems on purpose.”
“The tax code's complexity reflects decades of legitimate policy tradeoffs, not — six hundred fourteen specific carve-outs is a lot of legitimate tradeoffs, I'll admit that number's doing some work in that sentence. As for the wait times on assistance programs, that's an administrative capacity issue, it's not related, it's — it might be related.”
The receipts
CEOs at the lowest-paying corporations made roughly 614 times more than their median worker in 2025.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.