BY BOB BEARDEN
Entitlement is not a bad work and it is not a privilege. We, as citizens of this great nation, work to earn our entitlements.
There is a decided lack of compassion from most of the GOP presidential candidates. The claim they want to take back our country. From what?
Their plans include wrecking the Affordable Health Care Act, destroying Medicare. They want to fix problems with Social Security that aren’t problems and wish to do so by making workers work longer hours and longer years in order to ever hope to get any benefits from Social Security.
The problem with their narrative is that none of these three programs are in trouble or need the kind of fix they wish to visit upon them. Which with all would essentially mean destroying them.
They call them entitlement programs as if that is a bad thing. They need to find a dictionary and look up the word entitlement. They don’t have a clue as to what it means.
Entitlement is simply a descriptive word that means if you earn something you are entitled to share in the benefits. Workers pay their fair share [the fair share is determined by law] into Medicare throughout their work lives and therefore they are entitled to receive the benefits they have paid for over the years when they retire and are in their senior years.
Hence, the word entitlement applies. It is not something that the government gives them for free.
Workers have to work a minimum of time to be able to earn their share of Social Security benefits when they retire. Since they pay their fair share, that makes them entitled to receive benefits when they retire. Again the word entitlement applies – they are not getting something from the government for free.
The Affordable Health Care Act is another program in which workers and those who receive health care pay for and are entitled to receive because they pay a fair share for the benefits. Hence, the word entitlement applies to them as well. The AHCA, or ObamaCare if you prefer, is a program that if you pay for it, you are entitled to receive the benefits derived from it.
Entitlement doesn’t mean something for nothing entitlement means that if you pay your fair share you are entitled to receive the benefits you EARNED by paying for it.
The problem comes in that most of the candidates who make up the GOP field of Nightmares on Elm Street don’t understand what entitlement means. For them it means an entirely different thing from the word that is in every dictionary in every library in this nation. Why is that?
Because to all of these candidates, they consider entitlement to mean what it has always meant to them. The entitlement of privilege. They all pretty much come from the privileged class and, therefore, since they have never really had to work or sweat for what they have received, having received their entitlement as a right of their birth into a family of privilege, they have no real concept of what the word entitlement actually means or how it is applied in terms of Medicare, Social Security and ObamaCare.
We need to end Citizens United because it is making a mockery of our political system, handing us candidates who don’t even have a good grasp of the rhetoric they toss about as if they were tossing hay to bunch of cattle.
Entitlement means one thing to them and another thing as it is applied to the rest of us.
Of course we are entitled to receive our Social Security benefits. Of course we are entitled to receive our Medicare benefits. And of course we should be entitled to receive our benefits under ObamaCare.
WE HAVE EARNED this entitlement, not because we were to the manor born, but because WE EARNED them with our BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS! And we don’t need a group of wild jackasses to tell us otherwise!
– Bob Bearden, secretary of the Oklahoma State Association of Letter Carriers and a member Mayflower Congregational Church, UCC, is a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
