Entitled? Damned right we're entitled.

[cal04]

by Joan McCarter
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/18/1017981/-Entitled-Damned-right-were-entitled

(snip)
Right now, in today's political debate, the number one word we need to embrace: entitlement.

I see lots of arguments that by calling the core programs of our social safety net—Social Security and Medicare in particular—entitlements, we're somehow falling into the Republican trap, that it's already a dirty word and that by using it we're diminishing the importance of the programs.

Hogwash. Let's just get the basics here of what the word "entitled" means as it pertains to these programs: "a legal right or a just claim to receive or do something."

Legal right? Just claim? I think we've got that covered. By all means, there's a legal right and just claim to these monies by the people who have paid into the funds for their entire working lives. Like 93 year-old Esther Lenett says in the video above:

Social Security is our money. Workers fund Social Security, not the government

Workers fund Social Security and Medicare, and retired or disabled workers are entitled to have their contribution and the contract they made with their government honored.

Now that's not to say that a sense of entitlement is necessarily an okay thing to have. Like this guy, tea party Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who believes because he is a U.S. congressman he is entitled to not have to pay the $100,000 he owes in child support and to not have to appear, again, before a judge to explain precisely why he's failed to support the children he brought into the world.

Just as bad is the sense of entitlement Republicans have to get at our retirement money to pay for wars and more tax breaks for their base, or the entitlement to our hard-earned savings the banksters feel they have as they grasp at more sources of money to feed their gambling habit. Ironic that those who would make entitlement a dirty word are those who have the most perverted sense of what's due them just because of their position in society.

What it all boils down to in the end, as usual, is the fight. Democrats, progressives, liberals have to embrace the vocabulary of our beliefs, and to fight for them. Fight for the words and in fighting for the words, fight for what they represent. Being bullied into giving up how we talk about our basic principles puts us on the slippery slope of being bullied into chipping away at them, and the policies and programs that grew out of them. If we give up on defending the idea, how do we defend the product of that idea?

Words matter in politics. So do promises. Damned right, Social Security and Medicare are entitlements. And damned right the people who pay for them are entitled to what was promised them in return.

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[w0nderer]

1. kickety kick and reccity rec

entitlement how they mean it is closer to home than they think == expecting a large pension, good healthcare and a pretty descent salary for wanting to tell others how companies want them to behave..ie becoming a congressman

[jannyk]

2. K&R!

[luv_mykatz]

3. K & R

:kick: :kick: :kick: :kick: :kick: :kick:

[999998th word]

4. Not JUST an ENTITLEMENT--its also an OBLIGATION

We PAID INTO IT.
They can shove their 'reinterpretation' of that word up their sorry ass.

[digidigido]

5. They should call it what it is, an "earned benefit" program

[Disorientedx3]

6. terminology

I've been using the phrase "social investments".