Entitlement Cuts

The confusion around entitlements has begun in earnest once more.  Here are some important facts:
- Social Security is an entitlement
- Medicare is an entitlement
- Veteran’s benefits are entitlements
- Unemployment insurance is an entitlement

This is not an opinion, and it’s not a pejorative; it is reality of their budget classification.  In the examples above (‘Contributory’ entitlements), an individual is ‘entitled’ to the benefit because of a contribution that they have made.    

There are also ‘non-contributory’ entitlements, for which one qualifies through need, rather than because of a prior service, or monetary contribution.  These include Medicaid, SNAP, housing assistance, WIC, Head Start, among others.   

This confusion is no accident.  Those who aim to cut entitlement spending hope to ‘divide and conquer’ the opposition, by pitting us against one another.  They have found powerful—if unwitting—allies in those who can believe that their entitlement can be spared, if only we will stop calling it an entitlement.  

Be assured, that as willing as those currently in charge may be to make cruel cuts to the non-contributory entitlements that help the most vulnerable among us, it’s the big fat pots of money in the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds that their sponsors are after.  They must be stopped, but will not be stopped by denial, or confusion around labeling.  

Entitlement cuts (and the word ‘reform’ has no place here) are as malevolent as the pending tax code changes.  They are elements of an effort to restructure our society, further skewing the already lopsided distribution of wealth, in favor of the tiny, extremely wealthy plutocratic class.