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I've seen some confusion here recently about what "entitlement program" means. It saddens me greatly that the right-wing has been SO successful at demonizing the word "entitlement," because there really isn't anything sinister about it.
An ""entitlement program" in our government is simply this: a program that the government is legally required to pay for. All "entitlement" means here is that the government can't just arbitrarily decide that it won't fund or pay for Social Security this year. Entitlement programs are GOOD, because they represent a contract between government and the people that cannot be broken on a political whim; it takes an act of Congress to reduce funding for an entitlement program. Unlike most other government programs, entitlements CANNOT be manipulated or held hostage via the budget process. They are "safe" from partisan bickering in a way that other programs are not. Social Security and Medicare are entitlements.
Some people get panicky when they hear Social Security and Medicaid referred to as "entitlement programs," and they automatically assume that "entitlement" means "welfare," but it doesn't. It just means that the government has to pay for them, whether it wants to or not, because the government and the people have a contract that cannot be broken without an Act of Congress.
Welfare, on the other hand, is NOT an entitlement program. It used to be before the 1996 reforms, but thanks (in small part) to the way that Republicans managed to slander the word "entitlement" and confuse it in our minds with the common, pejorative use of "entitlement" (as in, "He has an entitlement complex"), and (in large part) to the way that the poor were demonized and slandered by the greedy right-wing (Reagan's mythical "welfare queens," etc.), our Congress stripped away welfare's entitlement status. Congress gave the states the right to set their own welfare "rules," and NO person is guaranteed help now. Before the 1996 reforms, AFDC was a promise made to the poor families with children in America, just like Social Security is a promise made to the elderly. As it stands now, welfare exists only so long as Congress and the states fund it.
With TANF replacing AFDC, we no longer promise the poor that their children deserve a basic level of support. TANF is a (VERY) grudging handout, not a promise, and it can be taken away whenever the government chooses to do so. The biggest and most tragic effect of welfare reform was this: we allowed the government to give itself permission to cease welfare when it decides to do so, and we removed the only guaranteed social safety net that the poor of America had.
So yes, Social Security IS an entitlement program. No, that DOESN'T mean welfare. But if we had any compassion left as a society, we'd be clamoring to restore welfare's entitlement status, too. A society that can't be bothered to make such a basic, humane promise of bare support to its poorest children is a society that is sick all the way down to the place where its heart used to be.
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