"If you have two jobs and got a raise at one last month and it's seasonal depending on how long the winter storms last and expect a holiday bonus at the other next season but didn't get one last year because there were budget cuts and you mow your neighbors' lawns and they sometimes tip you and your sister gave you cash to help you buy a house and you own stocks you don't understand that supposedly lost three percent when the markets closed and your jobs withhold taxes but you usually have to make it up with extra when accounts come due and your house is supposed to appreciate in value over time and you failed purple math, then how much do you earn?"

"Do you think it's better not to do subsidies if people aren't going to understand them?"

"I think you need to make them understandable."

"If they can't have any relationship to someone's income and they can't require any math I honestly don't see how to do them at all. I suppose we could force a shift to electronic banking and keep track of income for people and just tell them how much they make but then we end up taxing lots of things that are currently comfortably under-the-table."

"You could at least have it as an option. A simple accessible option, no 'fill out three pages with information you don't remember and didn't know to look up and wait four weeks and answer the phone during work hours'."

"We could try to build something that does that." He's frowning.

"I'm telling you this is a serious problem, you have no idea how many people are failing to get things they qualify for or even pay things they know they owe because they just can't get through all the steps."

"I realize it's a serious problem, it'd just also require modifying ten privacy laws and six banking ones and hiring an engineering team and getting them clearance for low-oversight billion ni accounting operations and I can think of three banks that will refuse to give us relevant access because it compromises their security. And I work in foreign affairs."

"That's not a no," he tells her.

Isama raises an eyebrow at Makel.

"The point of listing impossibly many logistical complications is that someone might think of a workaround. Or that if no one does we will appreciate him when he gets it working."

"If the rest of the world could go three seasons without lighting themselves on fire I could get it working."

"What does the world setting itself on fire have to do with it?"

"I do in fact work in foreign affairs, my actual job is ensuring that the fires at least don't reach our borders and ideally averting them, I can dally in domestic tax policy only to the extent I am not derelict in my duty of throwing endless buckets of water on stubborn idiots abroad."

Isama nods.

"If you run for office and win then you can do whatever, right?"

"You have more latitude in some respects and lots less in others. It's not an election this summer anyway."

"If someone designed the tool for you could you get it implemented -"

"You're not going to be able to convince banks or employers to send you all their payroll information."

"I guess if it were possible for private industry to do it'd probably already be taken care of since private industry is competent."

"Of course not. There are services that do this sort of thing but you have to find them and sign up for them, they don't solve the problem for the people who need it most."

"If the thing you want already exists we could just run public service announcements about it or hire people to go door-to-door and sign people up."

"There's a few places that'll fend off all your bureaucratic crap, yeah. I give my employees free Intercept service if they want it."

"Might be cheaper and would almost certainly be easier than trying to redo everything on the administrative end."

"They can't do everything, of course, and there's an up front cost where they have to learn all about you."