While the political right talks about curbing or even eliminating “entitlement” programs, the left describes the vital necessity of a “social safety net” for poor and middle-class Americans. 

Which is it? Can it be both?

There is a great ideological struggle over who controls the narrative of “rights vs. privileges.” Are the working and middle class mostly lazy louts trying to avoid hard work and also looking for “handouts” from the government? Are they desirous of being “on the dole?”

Or perhaps large swaths of workers are mostly an underpaid, exploited subclass that, by and large, can never accumulate wealth much beyond subsistence, and whose prospects for any reasonable retirement (golden years?) continue to be increasingly doubtful? 

Let’s start with health care. When people are seriously ailing, should there be a means test for treatment? For example, should a money test separate you from urgent treatment and/or life-saving care? Unlike most advanced societies, money is how we ration health care in the USA. Perhaps that is an error and healthcare should be a right. Or does that make it an “entitlement?” Whose “ox is being gored?”

I believe that if you are the patient, you would be inclined to say that treatment and care should be considered a right. If you are a right-wing media host with a seven-figure salary, you would likely think otherwise.

Regarding retirement income, about 40 percent of all seniors live almost exclusively on their monthly Social Security checks. (Source: bit.ly/3nQ2W6W.) After a historic 8.7 percent increase in January 2023, the average monthly check totaled $1,825.27, giving a yearly total of about $21,900. Take note, this average earned Social Security income is just the middle amount; there are 50 percent of the people whose check is below—sometimes well below—that middle figure. People in these circumstances have often worked for many years and in their senior years, likely, are still working. It seems a truly thin and paltry net of “entitlement” that protects millions of seniors from the ravages of abject poverty. Nonetheless, there are those who would like to further reduce those entitlement benefits.

While the American people remain largely in the dark, in the back rooms of Congress, millionaire elected representatives quietly dream up budget-balancing schemes to extract money from the poor and give it to the rich. These budget “balancers” must try to convince people that although their proposed budget cuts seem to “smell badly,” they are really for everyone’s good; especially the poor. 

Lately, through some self-inflicted political errors, the budget balancers proudly (and foolishly) unveiled their proposed cuts. Predictably, the American public quickly raised a cacophony of strenuous objections to the plan. The public “voted” that they had worked and contributed and were thus entitled to their “social safety net.” 

Yet again, the budget-balancing trolls of the oligarchs were rebuffed and quickly retreated… until they try again next time. 

Until then, they will continue to try to make us all believe that the social safety net is something that working people just don’t deserve.

John Pace lives in Honesdale, PA.