--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Monday, August 2nd. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you've ever tried fighting a medical bill, applying for unemployment, or filing for food assistance, then you know what a time suck it can be. There are mountains of red tape to cut through to claim benefits that are supposed to make your life easier. That is what I call the time tax, is a way of thinking about the administrative burden of government. And in some cases, thinking about how the government creates that burden purposefully to discourage people from using programs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Annie Lowry. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic. I spoke with her about how this time-consuming burden is by design. And a lot of times it discourages the neediest people from trying to get benefits at all.
--:-- Annie Lowry: During the pandemic recession, for instance, people were waiting months and months and months to get their unemployment insurance payments. They didn't come automatically. You have to petition the government to get them. And then there's a really long wait.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So you're saying this is by design. They want it to be difficult for you to access some of these social services so that you just don't do it?
--:-- Annie Lowry: Sometimes it's to make sure that the wrong people aren't getting a benefit, to make sure that people really do qualify for something. Sometimes it's very much on purpose. We want to make this tough to get.
--:-- Annie Lowry: And as a whole, I would say that government programs are just really difficult to use in the United States. You almost always have to apply for them. They don't come to you automatically. And there are some programs that are quite automatic. So Social Security, retirement benefits are probably the best example of this.
--:-- Annie Lowry: But, you know, something like Medicaid or food stamps, you might have to comply with a work requirement to get food stamps. And, you know, once I started seeing the time tax in social benefits, which is what I cover, you kind of start to see it everywhere. School lotteries are a form of this. If you are formerly incarcerated, you often still have to check in.
--:-- Annie Lowry: And I think that there's also private company time taxes. So like if you want to cancel a subscription service and it takes like three hours on the phone that a time tax too and one where government policy might be involved.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Are there any demographics that are particularly vulnerable to this time tax? Any characteristics to the people that you interviewed?
--:-- Annie Lowry: This is a regressive, regressive issue. And what I mean by that is to say that things for high income families tend to come automatically. So for instance, there's a savings program that a lot of high-income families use to save up money for their kids to go to college. It's called the 529 College Savings Program. And you just set up an account and put money in it, and that's it.
--:-- Annie Lowry: You don't have to apply for it. You don't have to comply with any requirements. There's no annual check-in. You just create it once, and that's all. It's just this tax benefit, and it's pretty lucrative over time.
--:-- Annie Lowry: But for low-income people, it's almost like the more the benefit is aimed at the poorest of the poor, the harder it is to get. Something like cash welfare, which comes through a program called TANF, it often requires drug tests. It requires in-person interviews. It requires ongoing compliance with work requirements.
--:-- Annie Lowry: The actual paperwork you have to fill out is really long and really, really complicated. And so people describe maintaining the benefit is taking like, it's like a part-time job.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At one point in this article, you write, the time tax is worse for individuals who are struggling than for the rich, larger for black families than for white families, harder on the sick than on the healthy. Unpack that for us, please.
--:-- Annie Lowry: Programs that are used disproportionately by black families who are more likely to be low income and low wealth than white families tend to be particularly punitive. There's just this skepticism, this insistence on these families bootstrapping themselves, this concern about fraud and welfare fraud and welfare queens.
--:-- Annie Lowry: And so I think the United States' history of racism, of administrative racism, is really important here.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you so much, Annie Lowry, with The Atlantic, writing on the time tax. Thank you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last year, Laura Landry was furloughed from her jobs as a nail technician and a hotel worker. She had a mortgage but she was able to defer her payments under special protections put in place during the pandemic Now Landry is months behind on her mortgage and can see how she catch up She says she's working as hard as she can to keep the home she's lived in for nearly two decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Landry is one of about 1.8 million homeowners whose mortgages, The Washington Post is reporting, are still in forbearance because of a COVID-related hardship. About a fifth of these borrowers are not going to be able to extend their forbearance past September. And at that point, these homeowners are going to be expected to start making monthly payments on debt that may have grown during the pandemic.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, communities of color are disproportionately impacted by this issue. About a fifth of mortgage borrowers are Black or Hispanic, but these groups make up about a third of people in forbearance. The same trend was seen in low-income neighborhoods.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The only option for some borrowers is going to be to put their homes on the market. Many are likely to sell their homes because the housing market is so hot right now. But there are still some people whose remaining equity is just not enough to cover all the costs involved in a sale. So they are likely to face foreclosure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Congress has authorized $10 billion to give out to states to help homeowners make their mortgage payments. But the federal rollout of this money has been slow, and many states are still figuring out how to distribute it to people in need.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post explains that by the time substantial funds actually reach homeowners, mortgage servicers will have had plenty of time to start foreclosures or demand payments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, my kids are really into dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets. They're about to be two years old, and I totally get how popular they are right now. But who knew how much went into the design and engineering of these nuggets?
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal talks to the mastermind of dino nuggets Mark Tolbert. He works at the Innovation Center at Purdue Farms, and his mission is bringing dinosaurs back from extinction in easily dippable frozen nugget form.
--:-- Mark Tolbert: He's a perfectionist too. The head and neck of the T-Rex nugget bothered him a lot. And the challenge is engineering them so they hold their shape through flash freezing a bumpy ride down the factory line and a steep drop into packaging.
--:-- Mark Tolbert: And a lot of the calculation and testing goes into preventing children from getting a headless brontosaurus or a stegosaurus missing a tail. And it's not just kids. There are a lot of adult fans of dinosaur nuggets.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The journal speaks to a jewelry designer who designs dino nugget earrings, and they are a smash hit. She's ramped up to making 50 pairs a week.
--:-- Shamita Basu: By the way, one of the hardest designs is a triceratops. It's a very popular dinosaur, but that three-horned head just doesn't work out as a nugget.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, the Olympic athletes who take gold stand highest on the podium, right? But psychology has some surprising insight into what's going on in the heads of the silver and bronze winners, the ones who are standing right beside the gold medalists.
--:-- Shamita Basu: NPR reports on a study that analyzed pictures of medalists from 2000 to 2016, and it used the software to analyze the faces and see who looked happiest on the podium. Gold medalists had the biggest smiles, of course, but then it gets interesting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The people who won bronze tended to have happier expressions than the people who won silver. And that's pretty consistent with a similar study that happened in 1995.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the people behind this new research says it's all about reference points. Silver medalists seem to look up, thinking, what mistake did I make to keep me from getting the gold?
--:-- Shamita Basu: But bronze winners, they're taking a wider view. They might be smiling bigger because they're just glad they got a medal at all.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The researcher says there's a potential lesson for the rest of us non-Olympians. If we only focus on who's better than us, we're setting ourselves up to feel bad. In Olympic terms, it's healthier to think of how a gold, silver, or bronze medal are all really impressive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're partnering with NBC Olympics throughout the Games. You can find stories, results, videos, along with lots of other great journalism, all on the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And while you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
