How did ‘entitlement’ become such a bad word?
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin still refuses to sign on to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that is the primary vehicle of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
Sometimes his objections are economic. He believes that the price tag is too high and that it will lead to inflation and imprudent additional debt.
Sometimes, however, Manchin objects to the bill in moral terms, rather than economic. In The Wall Street Journal, he charges that Congress is full of reckless spendthrifts who “have a strange belief there is an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis, and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequences for the future.”
On the flip side of these reckless spendthrifts are the entitled takers who believe the world owes them a living. He objects to them, as well.
Manchin says, “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”
So between the spendthrifts and the entitled takers, Manchin cannot support a bill laden with measures that most Americans want and need.
But Manchin’s moral take is an oversimplification. “Spendthrift” is a slippery term. Everyone’s a spendthrift on programs that they want. A fiscal conservative may spend lavishly on the military but be stingy when it comes to schools.
And many conservatives who are outraged over the proposed cost of helping parents raise their children and helping students go to college were quietly complicit when former President Donald Trump blew up the national debt by $7.8 trillion, largely due to tax cuts for the rich.
But I’m more interested in the “entitlement” side of the equation. Fiscal conservatives have always found it useful to attach a stigma to any benefits that derive from the government, particularly if they’re directed toward citizens who have less money and, thus, really need them.
It’s easier to trim the budget if we tell ourselves that the people who need food stamps or unemployment benefits are largely responsible for the plights in which they find themselves.
But the term “entitlement” has been hijacked. We need to redeem it and purge some of the negative connotations that attach to terms such as Manchin’s “entitlement mentality.”
Entitlements are no more than the benefits that we choose to give to ourselves and to our fellow citizens.
Is access to health care a right or a privilege? Or is it an entitlement? The distinction is frivolous. It’s whatever we choose to make it. Most western nations have already recognized the advantages of entitling every citizen to health care. If you’re French or British you’re entitled to health care. We’re not there yet. We could be. It’s a matter of choosing the kind of society we want.
The same holds true for affordable college, lower prescription drug prices, universal pre-K and tax credits for people trying to raise children in a culture that generally requires two incomes.
Of course, when Manchin talks about an entitlement mentality, he’s tapping into a stale cliché: single mothers who produce babies in order to increase their benefits and able-bodied men too lazy to work. But this is mostly mythology promulgated by the elements of our society who prefer to keep the middle class more angry at the citizens below them on the economic scale than at those above.
This mythology obscures the ordinary entitlements that we’ve agreed to give ourselves by means of our pooled resources: good roads, police protection, postal service, the expectation that we can go into nearly any city or town in the country and safely drink the tap water. It really is remarkable that if your house catches on fire, someone will come quickly and put it out.
These entitlements imply certain obligations and responsibilities, but they don’t have to be deserved. They come with citizenship, and every citizen has a right to them.
Most of the entitlements in Biden’s Build Back Better plan would benefit not only individuals but our society as a whole. The fact that conservatives have turned “entitlement” into a dirty word should not beguile us into denying ourselves of their benefits.