Lower-income New Yorkers are all too familiar with the burden of filling out endless reams of paperwork. Worried you won’t be able to feed your family? There’s a lengthy application for that. Need emergency cash or a housing voucher? There’s a stack of paperwork for that.

These processes take hours of precious time, continuous follow-up with agencies, and can take weeks or months before benefits are secured. But there’s an easy way to alleviate part of this burden — the government must automatically enroll eligible individuals in public benefit programs.

In her new book “The Time Tax,” The Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey explores this exact phenomenon — the vast bureaucracy established to access benefits or government services, from filing tax refunds to applying for food stamps. She calls the mental, emotional, and administrative burden tied to these onerous processes the........

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