I think the difference is that large numbers of people want government services for poor people to suck as a cost- control measure.
I feel like I should have something intelligent to say about the article, but my first thought, in response to the OP, is to think of other examples in the private sector that are known for having a time tax (anything involving the cable company; trying to get airlines to change something even when they are the ones that canceled the flight you were originally booked on; canceling a gym membership. . .)
Healthcare can be so difficult to use - even when it's kind of elective - like some dermatology stuff or reproductive endo. You could theoretically shop for your hip replacement, but the service is still challenging.
The DIY videos on YouTube don't really help either.
1: But everyone uses the DMV/RMV. Why are they so bad?
IME the DMV actually isn't that bad, there are just jokes about it. When was the last time you heard of someone having a real DMV problem -- not being able to get their license, or register their car, or something? I never have.
Our "DMV" stuff happens at a private contractor office. You only need to go to the actual government if you have to do the road test.
More serious answer, I think the original article (and comment 1) err in describing this as primarily a deliberate policy choice.
There are plenty of examples of people deliberately making it difficult to access safety net procedures but I think the primary reason isn't deliberate malice but the absence of a clear directive for improvement. Making things user-friendly is difficult, and takes time, money, and leadership, and those are in short supply*. Particularly at the Federal level, I expect it's often a low priority compared to immediate priorities.
And that's a problem -- it should be important -- I just think the problem is larger, and the solution more challenging than just calling people's attention to the issue.
* side note, the Clinton, "Re-inventing government" program was supposed to address some of these issues. Are there any good retrospectives on how that succeeded or failed? A quick search turns up this and this.
Brookings scholar Don Kettl, in one of his periodic assessments of NPR said in 1998: "No executive branch reform in the twentieth century -- indeed, perhaps in the Constitution's 210 years -- has enjoyed such high-level attention over such a broad range of activities for such a long period of time."
...
In the end, though, the real measure of impact was: did Americans' trust in their federal government to do the right thing increase? The answer was yes. Between 1994 and 1998, the University of Michigan's biennial survey of Americans on this question nearly doubled from an all-time low of 21 percent to 40 percent. (see Trust in Government). While NPR's efforts cannot claim all the credit for this increase, other studies have shown public trust is strongly tied to performance, and in a 1999 survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, 60 percent of respondents said they noticed improvements in service over the previous two years.
This claims that Obama tried to improve the Federal government's technology strategy.
This story is part of a six-part series on how Obama has, over the last eight years, elevated the profile of IT in the public sector. He taught government how to ride the technology bicycle, so to speak. . . .
...
Of all of Obama's tech strategies and programs, these White House roles are the most susceptible to change. A new administration may continue Obama's organizational structure or dismiss it. Typically, a rebranding takes place and people and positions come and go. Yet, if there's one aspect of the new roles that endure, it may be their core ingredients. The common character traits to these hires is a mix of private-sector expertise, presidential authority and job descriptions that embrace modern problem-solving.
A new president, whatever his or her political leaning, may apply the same strategy under a set of new titles, for the results have shown promise. They include the development of Data.gov, the national open data portal launched in 2009 with now more than 180,000 public data sets, and the Precision Medicine Initiative, an endeavor spearheaded by Patil and the National Institutes of Health to find genome-based cures for diseases like cancer. In addition, there are several U.S. Digital Service projects that have vastly improved agency operations handling veteran benefits, the immigration process and college education applications, to name a few.
The UK has a thing called the Government Digital Service, which has put quite a lot of time into developing a methodology for running digital government projects. The net result is that accessing Gov digital services in the UK is actually quite good. Some processes are still evil, as a matter of government policy,* but the rendering of those processes in the digital domain, is mostly excellent.
It's easy to find things, and easy to do things once you find them.
* have been through this recently with my wife trying to acquire UK citizenship
I liked the essay a lot, agree with that it's a helpful clarification. I mentioned at the other place that I'd love to see section 8 renters who keep your city running as an ongoing thing similar to what UFW runs for farm workers.
punish their customers
Dealing with telecom providers, insurance companies, or Microsoft as a user is no better than dealing with car licensing authorities in the US. I understand that I'm not MS's customer in any meaningful way.
Banks and brokerages as well actually- any request that's nonstandard IME leads to a 2-week odyssey of repeated phone menu siege attempts to get the question to someone who can answer. Why does transferring money from one account to another either take three days or incur hefty fees?
Easier to get a live voice to answer a question at the IRS than at Google, and if the request to Google isn't something they already support, equally unlikely to get traction.
The IRS isn't bad once you get the right person on the phone. They fixed my identity theft thing very fast, if you don't count the hours before we got the right person to answer. Microsoft has never fixed anything for me and the security of an Xbox is intrusive and clunky.
(anything involving the cable company; trying to get airlines to change something even when they are the ones that canceled the flight you were originally booked on; canceling a gym membership. . .)
And these are all difficulties with using the service once you've purchased it. I don't have much of a point except that businesses care about getting your money much more than they do about helping you afterwards, which is no longer very relevant as a model for how we'd like government to behave.
Because we can't get Fios, I'm at the mercy of the cable company.
And these are all difficulties with using the service once you've purchased it.
I think that just leads into my serious point that providing a good experience takes time, money, and leadership, and that it isn't something that the private sector automatically does well -- you can tell which companies invest in it, and which don't (and you can usually see why there are or aren't incentives to invest in that customer service).
6: It's better than it used to be by a LOT. Tim did have trouble when he bought a car out of state, and they had the wrong lien-holder, and they said he had to go back to a specific office several hours away, because that's where the paperwork was. He did solve the issue without doing that by tweeting about it. The social media teams are really effective.
Department of Education which outsourced a lot of stuff to FedLoan has been a pain to deal with.
The out-of-state car was the worst. I called, asked what to bring, got everything together, waited in line for like an hour and then told I needed to pay with a cashier's check and nobody mentioned that when I called. But that was 20 years ago.
I'm hearing lots of DMV stories lately, because a bunch of friends have kids that are turning 16 and the DMV was granting extensions for most of last year and now is super backlogged. There seem to be some parents who find it insanely complex and impossible to navigate, and others who say, "I just went to the website, made sure I had everything that I needed on their list, and booked an appointment at a rural DMV an hour away that had availability, and it was done."
ttaM is right about the British government sites, though. Someone has put a lot of effort into those and they mostly just work.
The first time I encountered this was when I tried to do the right thing and pay nanny tax for a babysitter. I discovered that the state unemployment website has business hours. They're fairly long- 6am-10pm- but what possible rationale is there to close a website every night? They don't do maintenance every night and if there's some kind of DB backup I doubt it takes 8 hours. Maybe they think they're a prime hacking target and don't want to allow access when no one can respond quickly.
I saw a story about how people whose Facebook accounts had been hacked couldn't get a response (talk about a company where "if you're not the customer you're the product" applies.) Then someone realized Oculus has much better support and runs off the same accounts so people bought an Oculus, used the receipt and SN to get account support, then returned the Oculus for a full refund.
Like commenters here are saying, I don't think unnecessary paperwork and hassle is unique to the government, and I don't even think it's regressive -- I think in a way you can view time taxes as progressive in that time "costs" more to a rich person than to a poor person because of their opportunity cost translated to $.
The reason I'm pointing this out is that I think this is a big reason why rich people are more libertarian. They've dealt with a higher fraction of the pyramid of needs and can focus more of their annoyance energy on regulation.
We just tried to get the kid a new passport through the routine where you make an appointment for both parents to show up at the post office in person with all appropriate documents, I guess to verify that no one is trying to spirit the kid out of the country as part of a guerrilla custody battle. Anyway we all get there at the appointed time, wait ten minutes in line because it's the post office, and are then told by an aggrieved clerk (who was clearly having a bad day for independent reasons) that because we're ten minutes late and didn't prefill our form we have to take a hike.
I know pandemic, State Department backlogged, etc.; but the punchline is that four days later, on August 9th, we get an email reminding us of our upcoming appointment on August 5th, and advising us to show up early with our form prefilled.
We got passports for all of us a few years ago and it was pretty easy. Probably because no covid, but you might was to try the Homestead post office, which is on the way to Kennywood.
It was like being helped by Mr. McFeely on a good day.
20: oh, my god yes. One time I found out that if you call, you are supposed to call on different days depending on the letter of the alphabet your name starts with.
21: No, because rich people can pay others to do things. Also, having someone file your taxes does not require an in-person appointment like getting food stamps does.
I suppose the same is true of something like immigration. People with money had to go do the same interviews in the Trump era, but having a lawyer handle a lot of the details makes the process smoother and less time consuming. Only progressive if you can't outsource it.
In the last couple of decades, I have had good experiences with the DMV, and until very recently, I have had fine service from that despised government-run monopoly: The US Postal Service.
When I was young and lost a job, I went through an arduous process to get unemployment. I completed the process, and only then did my former employer contest it. I showed up at the hearing; my ex-employer did not. So I won the case and collected two weeks of unemployment until I found another job. I was informed by the government, however, that during the course of the hearing, I had revealed that I was subject to jury service. Therefore, I was unavailable for work and would have to return the payments I had received. I didn't, and they never followed up.
My worst customer service experiences have been with the cable company. Hands down.
My worst customer service was a Wendy's in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Now that you mention it, I've had some spectacularly bad service at Burger King. One time, they were out of Whoppers.
Me too, but in their defense, in retrospect it seems obvious there would never be a promotion where you get a free Whaler if you go into the restaurant screaming, "We've been eating people!"
Echoing ttaM in 10, the US equivalents are the US Digital Service and 18F. They do a lot of good work. The VA site, for instance, is very good. But there's an enormous number of sites and services that they haven't been able to touch yet.
21: I think there's a case that the time tax is regressive. Sure, the wealthier person's time is worth more if it were billed by the hour, but most people aren't actually billing by the hour, and don't e.g. have to find the time to request a different shift, take the bus across town, etc. Maybe it's simply that it likely costs more time for the poor person than the wealthier person.
I'm actually litigating whether buying a car for cash in stae A from a resident of state A, whch is registered in syate B subjects the buyer to personal jurisdiction in state B.
Buyer has no other contacts.
Also, tried to get a human at Facebook when the wife's account was hacked and locked. To no avail.
There are plenty of examples of people deliberately making it difficult to access safety net procedures but I think the primary reason isn't deliberate malice but the absence of a clear directive for improvement.
I strongly disagree. The inefficiencies on the ground often come down to insufficient staff and resources, but frequently suspicion of the beneficiaries and of their need for assistance motivates that deficit.
This is at an extreme in the US where a lot of our social programs are bifurcated into that for the salaried middle class (social insurance) vs. for the wage-earning poor (social welfare), and policymakers hold the former to much higher standards than the latter. Not just Medicare vs. Medicaid, but also SSDI vs. SSI, unemployment insurance vs. TANF, and SNAP vs. WIC (although SNAP has been expanded to most low-income people now, WIC is still one of the "poor programs").
Maybe it's not active, intentional "I will make this suck" malice in most states, but there's definitely a kind of depraved indifference at work, because policymakers do understand the distinction IMX.
I strongly disagree. The inefficiencies on the ground often come down to insufficient staff and resources, but frequently suspicion of the beneficiaries and of their need for assistance motivates that deficit.
I think there are plenty of examples to support that but consider the VA hospital system*, which has a long-time reputation for (a) delivering good quality health care and, (b) being unpleasant and (c) serves a politically sympathetic constituency.
I do believe the time tax is regressive and that the problem is worse for poor people I also think (perhaps I've been reading too much Yglesias) that it's not necessary to frame it as a problem for poor people.
It is good to draw attention to the problems faced by people trying to access safety net programs, but the problem of trying to nurture a functional government bureaucracy is larger than that.
* I'm using this as an example just based on what I've read; I have no personal or even second-hand experience.
My spouse is experiencing something in this realm at the moment. They're severely depressed and seeking some intensive treatment. Getting enough time off work for the intensive treatment is only possible under FMLA (unpaid time off!), which has an arduous approval process that so far has taken about five weeks... and the third-party workplace management firm just bounced the forms back to them because the treatment provider missed a field or a signature on the paperwork. So now it's my spouse's problem to know this, communicate it to the provider, overcome the provider's irritation at having to deal with this paperwork, and get them to re-submit it in a slightly modified form, and hope that it takes less than another five weeks to work through their bureaucracy this time, so that they can go to the scheduled treatment (which, if missed, will take at least another month to reschedule). This is all perfectly fine work for someone six years into a bout of treatment resistant depression!
Yikes. Best wishes for the bureaucracy-beating and, especially, the treatment.
Ugh, so sorry, George. I remember how it felt to encounter much more minor hurdles to mental health care and that was bad enough. Hope the intensive treatment offers some relief.
Atrios [I think it was] has a (very correct) schtick about how when white people fall into the social safety net bureaucracy, they are *instantly* enraged that the system (or various bureaucrats) have it in for them. They're convinced that somehow the "shiftless Blacks" have some special secret welfare only they get access to, while white people have to deal with this system that dehumanizes them, wasting endless hours of their time for a pittance of help.
What they don't understand, is that the system is designed that way on purpose, and for all "customers".
I think the same can be said for customer service all over corporate America. It's a "cost center" and they know that if they make it sufficiently unpleasant, we won't bother to follow up.
George Washington: Oy. I'm so sorry for your spouse, and for you too. It's completely maddenning.
Does anybody here remember when the Tories (in the UK) instituted their who "make any sort of relief from the government incredibly tedious and painful" ? I remember reading about these disabled people who were denied benefits b/c they didn't show up for meetings .... in buildings without wheelchair access. Other crazy, crazy stories. It became pretty clear that the entire method was to wear these people down, so they'd just crawl away and die in a corner. The "hostile environment" stuff was similar, and frankly, they got away with a lot of it, until suddenly it was affecting EU citizens in the UK, and then there was a big hue and cry.
43: yes. "universal credit" is a completely vile system, full of deliberate cruelties as well as inadvertent ones. I pay by standing order into the local food bank every month and it is so fucking SHAMING that we have elected governments that make this necessary.
18: My experiences with the Texas DMV improved *greatly* between my two in-person appearances in 2009 and 2021. Granted, 2009 was a little more complicated (had to take the driving test), but this summer was heaps better, despite the pandemic-driven backlog. The only, minor, snag was that each time you visited the web site, it tried to divert me into doing my thing online, even though I knew it was a thing that could not be done online. Apart from that, I did exactly what the other friends did: keep checking localities until I found one that had availability in the time window I needed. And it wasn't even far away by Texas standards!
The list of things you needed was accurate, and on the day of my appointment they were running on schedule, with enough slack to be able to help out some walk-ins who didn't have appointments. It was soooo much better than 2009. Big thanks to whoever re-engineered the DMV processes in the interim!
Registering my car last year took two trips because I didn't have the right form the first time. The Web site could have been more clear but technically it was all there so this was at least partly my fault. The second trip took less than an hour, for what it's worth, despite covid precautions.
We don't use TurboTax, but we do use an accountant in personal practice. We didn't actually get them signed and submitted until July, due to both us doing it at the last minute and him getting it in late due to always being busy in that season. I don't think we've actually been charged any fees for lateness, but I'm more and more inclined to try to deal with the 1040-EZ myself one of these years.
Apparently Garrison Keilor is unhappy with the SS administration (and comes across as a terrible person): https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/08/sometimes-its-who-you-most-expect-2
He seems to be a terrible person in lots of dimensions, IIRC.