‘Entitlement’ Is a Republican Word

[marmar]

from truthdig:




‘Entitlement’ Is a Republican Word

Posted on Jul 14, 2011
By Bill Boyarsky


At his news conference this week, President Barack Obama seized on a misleading Washington word—“entitlements”—to describe the badly needed aid programs that are likely to be cut because of his compromises with the Republicans.

“Entitlement” is a misleading word because it masks the ugly reality of reducing medical aid for the poor, the disabled and anyone over 65 as well as cutting Social Security. Calling such programs entitlements is much more comfortable than describing them as what they are—Medicare, Social Security and money for good schools, unemployment insurance, medical research and public works construction that would put many thousands to work.

It’s also a Republican word. It implies that those receiving government aid have a sense of entitlement, that they’re getting something for nothing. And now it’s an Obama word as he moves toward the center and away from the progressives who powered his 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination over centrist Hillary Clinton.

“There is, frankly, resistance on my side to do anything on entitlements,” he said before heading into another negotiating session over raising the debt limit and cutting the budget. “There is strong resistance on the Republican side to do anything on revenues. But if each side takes a maximalist position, if each side wants 100 percent of what its ideological predispositions are, then we can’t get anything done.” .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/entitlement_is_a_republican_word_20110714/

[robcon]

1. Entitlement is actually a budgeting word.

It defines those programs whose budgets are decided not as lump sums, but as the cost incurred by the number of people entitled to those programs.

[DURHAM D]

2. I find this debate over the word "entitlements" somewhat amusing.

When I was in college back in the 70s studying public policy these programs (medicare, SS, etc.) were always referred to as "middle class entitlements".

And now its a dirty word...? really?

[Ragnarok]

3. An entitlement is...

...exactly what it is. You are entitled to something you paid for. Nothing dirty, malicious or nefarious about it. I hold me head no higher or lower when it is used. It's just business. I use it all the time to piss of right wing hawksters. Are going to let them change the way we talk?

[Keeping Track]

5. Entitlements

Social security should be referred to as deferred earnings
with interest, maybe in parentheses after each mention.

[SharonAnn]

9. "Earned Benefits" is the term I use. We have earned the benefits. Like our IRA's,etc..

And, when they talk about CEO's, etc. "earning" millions of dollars I say "I beg to differ. They were PAID that much. I doubt that they EARNED it."

[Igel]

10. Nonsense.

Dispose of the "you paid for" and it's good.

Welfare is an entitlement because the law stipulates certain conditions to receive it. If you meet those conditions, the law entitles you to receive welfare. Period. No requirement that you pay into it.

My nephew got some sort of SS payment until he turned 18. His mother was on disability. It was an entitlement. By virtue of her receiving disability payments because she was certified as unable to work he was entitled to receive the money. He'd never paid into the program. It wasn't one of the conditions.

SS is an entitlement. One of the conditions is that you participate in the SS program and pay FICA for so many years. Meet the conditions, you're entitled to receive it. It's probably still not true that the average SS recipient has paid in as much as s/he's going to receive before death. My mother's receiving it still, 20 years after the fact, and has received more in each year (even adjusted for inflation) than she paid in over the course of any three years while working.

Meet the conditions, you're entitled to the money or benefit. That's all. Nothing more.

Now, I *have* met people who believed that they were entitled to receive payments and it rankled. At times, they gamed the system: They met the requirements but misused the funds (an act of bad faith) or they took positive steps to make sure they met the requirements, having decided that the cost of meeting the requirements was worth it. Some just lied, sometimes by omission. They didn't believe that the aid was for those actually needy--they believed they should get the money because of who they were, not because of the conditions they found themselves in. One girl planned getting pregnant in school because then she'd get free day care, additional state/federal money, and when the kid was ready for pre-K she'd be about to graduate so she'd have a kid (+ prestige), get money (+!), get free day care (+), get special tutoring and provisions for school at home (+). She didn't see the downside. Then she would bring her infant in to the school nursery hungry in the morning knowing that somehow, somewhere, money would be found to feed it so that she didn't need to use her WIC money for food for her kid. She *deserved* that trip to the nail salon, she special and utterly shameless about it. She was 16. Her mother was 32. Her grandmother, not yet 50, did the actual babysitting when her granddaughter wasn't in school. Her grandmother was ashamed for her. Her mother, proud to be emulated. I really felt sorry for the kid--the infant, that is.

So yes, there are people like that, even though advocates try to say such people couldn't exist. This kind of moocher gives the word "entitlement" a bad name, but only because narrow minded people generalize the percentage that are like that to 100% of those receiving entitlements, and because others are linguistic rubes and don't know any better than to adopt the connotations given to the word by those doing the over-generalizing.

[elocs]

4. Words come to mean what they become taken to mean, not necessarily the true definition.

It really makes no difference if "entitlement" is not a dirty word if Republicans have succeeded in convincing much of the nation that it is a dirty word. They are very good at this.

Republicans not only define words, they define us (Democrats)and they define the terms of the debate, all of which serves to put Democrats on the defensive.

[Ragnarok]

6. Then take it back...

...at least that's my strategy. They don't get the dictionary any more than they get Old Glory or the Gadsden Flag. I fought too hard for those things. Screw 'em.

[Igel]

11. Most people can still handle differences in meaning based on register.

It's not really that hard and doesn't take that much of an education or exposure to language outside their little group.

What am I saying?

However, a lot of such stylistic niceties involve the use of specific intonations. I remember the entire Afro-American/African-American/black ethnonym changes back in the '70s and '80s. "African-American" connoted respect, I was told.

Then I went home and heard my mother saying that "I don't want want any of them cotton-picking 'African-Americans' moving into *this* neighborhood." The n-word would have expressed no more contempt or disdain given the sneer that accompanied "African-American". (Of course, to those who believe that intent doesn't matter, my mother must have been expressing high respect indeed for those people she wanted her neighborhood to be untainted by.)

I'd also note that words have no "true" definition. They have the definition given to them by a speech community, no more and no less. Native speakers are adept at picking the appropriate definition by context, when they don't fill ill-disposed to. Definitions change over time; etymology is a bad guide most of the time; former meanings are only needed for reading old documents. Take "gay" for example--are all homosexuals *really* all that merry? Hardly. But when teenagers watch old movies from the '40s and '50s and even '60s and hear the word "gay" they laugh.

There can be technical definitions (so my physics book rails against some usages of the word 'heat', essentially saying that common usage is 'wrong' when it's just non-technical). Most words have multiple meanings; very few pairs of words actually have the same set of meanings. Most people navigate this linguistic space with aplomb. Some suspend their linguistic competence when power and advantage come into play. My sociolinguistics prof joked that *his* sociolinguistics prof had joked that the only true synonyms were two dialectal words for a plant that grows in the north of England. Two nearby villages each had their own word for this plant, but in the previous century (meaning the 19th) the villages had grown together and completely lost their separate identities while the two words continued to exist with the same dialectal status but no linking of either to a specific "kind" of villager. Then he joked that the words had probably been forgotten, meaning English currently has no true pairs of synonyms.

The entire "define the word for somebody and you define them" is a nice canard that only works when you mostly live in a verbal universe, not the physical universe. A lot of people do, unable to couple the sound-meaning connection with actual referents. It's 3rd grade reasoning. Relatively unsophisticated 3rd grade reasoning.

[CartoonDiablo]

7. :(

Obama is literally willing to cut entitlements to make the Republicans "look bad" (because cutting the big three is a great way to look good).

[Wait Wut]

8. I don't get it.

I paid for it. I'm entitled to it. It's my entitlement. Tell the GOP to go fuck themselves. If they don't want theirs, I'll take it.

[Igel]

12. Does that mean you want your OASI to be a kind of sinking fund with your name on it?

Not how SS ever worked. Not how it works. You get more than you pay in if you live to the average age of death.

You're entitled to it because Congress says so. They change the rules and suddenly more people become entitled or, conceivably, fewer. They have changed the rules in the past, stipulating higher payments in and higher payments out, tweaking the requirements to receive it and who can receive it and who must pay.

I had a couple of bosses in the '80s who had never paid FICA. When the one died, his widow couldn't claim OASI. If anything had happened to him when he had two underage daughters, they wouldn't have qualified for survivors payments or disability payments. In fact, if my bosses had wanted to start paying into SS to qualify for OASI they were forbidden from doing so. Silly us, the bookkeepers, had accidentally withheld FICA for them for 15 years. They and their employer got every dime back when it came to the IRS' attention.

[Wait Wut]

13. To be honest...

...it's unlikely I'll need to worry about it. My health issues will prevent me from reaching the age of retirement. The system does need fixing. How? I'm not intelligent enough to figure that out. I'm just hoping it gets fixed for everyone else.