We are collapsing under the weight of our entitlements.
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
~ Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th Century A.D.
Greetings my fellow Americans!
If there is anything about the 21st-Century version of the United States which stands most starkly in contrast to the original framework and intent of our Founders, the payment of so-called entitlements from government, at all levels, may be the largest of the elephants in the room. It is also the pachyderm which has been given the most political lip service, especially during the last quarter of the previous 100 or so years, and, ironically, the one simultaneously receiving the least amount of actual legislative action. Most, if not all, of said recurring payments currently in circulation were instituted in our last century, the dam arguably breached with the advent of Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit in the first decade of those 1900s.
While little, if anything is said about entitlement today (by members of either major political party), the clarion call for reform, if not outright elimination, of “free money” via “redistribution of wealth” was the most vociferous in my lifetime during the 1980s and ‘90s. President Ronald Reagan (a former Democrat and true patriot) used the strength of his public presence and persona to gather momentum for perhaps the most forthright American conversations about how to rein in the increasingly massive social programs put in place via such grandiose centralized initiatives as the New Deal (featuring Social Security and Welfare) of the 1930s, and the War on Poverty (more Welfare) and the Great Society (Medicare and Medicaid) during the 1960s.
Now, some would argue that Social Security is not an entitlement, but, rather, later-year remuneration for previous contributions made to “the system” while said recipients were gainfully employed. That was certainly the original premise under which it was sold to the U.S. citizenry (in the midst of the so-called Great Depression, mind you); it was also to be both supplemental and “temporary” to help those nearing end-of-life (which averaged Age 60 for men, 64 for women in 1935) scrape through those leaner economic times.
However, like most purportedly short-lived government programs, Social Security continues today, paying benefits to a populace with an average lifespan of 79 years. Insofar as life expectancy has been steadily increasing over the life of the Social Security Administration, many beneficiaries of this supplement have, for decades now, received far more in paybacks than was ever paid in; furthermore, the “lock box” of the general fund which was claimed to be dedicated to SSA benefit payments was raided long ago to pay for other social programs, making the former tantamount to a Ponzi scheme from which no one would be allowed to be weaned, or to decline to participate, as a member of the U.S. workforce, in order to fulfill the original promise of the temporariness of this “supplemental benefit.”
Welfare, meanwhile, covers a relatively broad suite of categories, including healthcare, public assistance, unemployment, family allowance, and work-injury compensation. Having morphed and grown substantially since public institution, such types have been available since at least the FDR New Deal of the 1930s, and were expanded exponentially in the LBJ years of the 1960s. An exhaustive list of the programs and bureaucracies which have been, and continue to be, created and expanded to provide these entitlements (at both the federal and State levels) exceed the limits of my time and interest to research and explicate, and the word count of a single AFNN article.
Sadly, the aforementioned Ronald Reagan, arguably the greatest modern-day U.S. President, was unable to effect any meaningful federal spending reforms, though he did lead the charge on tax reform which enabled a period of economic growth which increased the amount of money the central government was able to spend via receipts from the private sector. Though the argument could be made that Democrat Party control of Congress for much of the Republican Reagan’s tenure limited the possibilities for reforming anything which may have resulted in less government, there was little political will from either side of the aisle to sail against the headwinds of general public sentiment against reducing or eliminating any entitlement programs, especially the largest, Social Security.
The last “reform” of the central government I can remember actually came during the Clinton administration in 1996, when “welfare-to-work” became at least a temporary mantra, and benefit payments became dependent on actively seeking, and find, employment. To my knowledge, there have been no meaningful initiatives, from either party, to reform, or otherwise reduce, the size and scope of government vis-à-vis entitlements. Nor has there been any tax reform a la Ronald Reagan; rather, “stimulus” money is distributed to address the litany of “crises” which have become the norm since at least 2008.
To a population woefully ignorant of basic economics, any notion of cutting government spending which could result in private citizen “belt-tightening” or learning to live without an entitlement which has been available for generations (or into which someone believes he has paid his “fair share”) is anathema. However, such payments are antithetical to the founding principles of America. The collection of these may not represent the only albatross around our collective necks, but it hangs among the largest and heaviest, with no apparent desire to even acknowledge its existence any longer. The backbone of America will eventually break under this massive weight.
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The debt problem is more an ideology problem, where the ideology of the left uses unconstitutional law to invoke a form of communism, by playing the Robin Hood game, and then pretending to be noble and good.
Whether it is Social Security or studying the mating habits of frogs, all of it that is spent outside the boundaries set by the Constitution is the problem. All those expenditures that are not counted as entitlements are as much a problem as their brethren laws that we love to place all the blame on.
A law, such as the National Highway Trust Fund, may have come from good intentions, or it may even have come out of a need for national defense. Regardless, it was just another taxing that left an opportunity to be robbed by the crooks in the swamp, and those who support them. Our foreign policy allows for the essence of bribing other countries, by cash payments, and the latest example is Ukraine, since we have no idea how many crooks were in on that raid. All we know is that we paid the bill through taxing and borrowing additional funds from somewhere.
We live under a set of rules that says that the government doesn’t have to balance its spending and revenue, when we, as taxpayers always do. A system like that will always fail. The ones who caused this are the politicians who created bureaucracies to hide what their true intentions were: to play Robin Hood, but steal the booty. The bureaucracy is another form of a bribe. When you create a government job, you end up creating another employee who has no responsibility, other than to play the game that robs you of everything, one little bit at a time. His bribe is his job, that he protects like a block of gold, because it is.
We tend to go after the big fish, but we always forget about the one that got away, like all the entitlements we pass off as insignificant. Money that is collected to do something, like protect the borders from invasion is a real entitlement, because that is written into the Constitution, directly. The rest that we call entitlements are theft from government.
Whatever it is, that is called an entitlement, the only ones who feel entitled are the ones who rob you of the resource, money. And it is way too late to fix the problem.