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7 Comments
LOL I was submitting this when the e-mail announcing it arrived. Just too damn good to be true. Love it. The new Megan Kelly is right.
Jon Stewart is America’s greatest truth asset.
I’ve been wondering for a while why the word “entitlement” is so universally accepted by all parties. I get why the conservatives would want to brand them as such, but the moderates and progressives fall right in line and use the same word, with it’s negative connotation and all. I don’t think the word even accurately describes the giant group of things they use it to describe. I wish the center and left would stop letting the right get away with negative branding in this case and stop using that word for things that really are not “entitlements” at all.
Entitlement: A person from a wealthy family inherits and sits on his duff living off his wealth. That’s entitlement.
My thought of the day is that private companies produce jobs: overseas.
The government produces jobs: In this country.
Like nurses aides to care for the elderly or people who train medics, etc. raising the quality of living in this country
To be fair, Kelley seems to have been a proponent of maternity leave before she became a beneficiary of it; it’s a little dishonest to lump all her beliefs about benefits and social programs together and look for internal contradictions.
With that said, I think our discourse on social programs is among the most polluted and misinformed topics we cover in politics. It’s also, I think, the most important – how we distribute our resources and what it means to be American. People like Kelley – mouthpieces for the corporate ideal – certainly don’t help.
ZJD – I agree that Kelley seems to have not been opposed to maternity leave. But I think Stewart’s point is that its rather convenient to be a supporter of an entitlement that you benefit from while you deride all other social benefits that do not apply to you. I don’t think that Stewart was looking for internal contradictions as much as pointing out the hypocrisy.
Although, you could say that any individual instance of hypocrisy can be based on internal contradictions. I’m not sure that was the case here, but I’d love to hear what others thinks about this.
With that said, you are absolutely right that our discourse around social welfare is pitiful. To TJ’s point, why is it that entitlement has such a negative connotation at all? Aren’t we all entitled to due process? Aren’t we all entitled to fair treatment by our government? Am I not entitled to vote by virtue of being a US citizen? I have a contract with my employer that says that I am entitled to receive payment in exchange for my service on a particular schedule, an entitlement enforceable in a court of law. When I was a renter, I was entitled to move into clean and safe housing that had a working stove (under Boston code) and hot water.
An entitlement is a right to benefits specified under law or contract. It is really sad that it is now widely conceived of as “a belief that one deserves certain privileges” when it applies to things like social security, Medicare, college loans, etc. It’s also frustrating that the home mortgage interest deduction and corporate farm subsidies are not viewed as the entitlements they really are. Perhaps it is time to take back the word. Like when the gay rights community embraced the term “queer”.
This is something the some terrible Unions negotiated for and got for their people a few years back. I would like to know where this “entitlement”, began, and who got the ball rolling on this. I’m pretty sure companies didn’t just start giving this out of the good of their hearts.