Some of us are fighting to have welfare programs REINSTATED as entitlements.

[Lyric]

Some of us are out there writing letters, calling Congresscritters, doing research, compiling data, and working damned hard to try and undo the vicious, inhumane welfare reforms of 1996. Those reforms took a guaranteed source of basic income for qualifying poor people and ripped it away. They replaced it with block grants administered by states and gave those states the power to deny aid to people who are qualified for it based on arbitrary "qualifications" that each state could make up for themselves.

Considering how hard some of us are working to undo this assault on America's poor people, could our supposed allies PLEASE stop advocating the Republican frame of "Entitlement = BAD WORD"? Our goal is difficult enough as it is. Wholeheartedly embracing the right-wing's malevolent usurpation of that word makes it MUCH harder for the rest of us to try and convince uninformed people that entitlement programs are public goods that should be respected and protected, not attacked.

The right-wing did the same thing to the word "liberal", but because there are lots of privileged, white, middle-class people who identify as "liberal", we fought (and are STILL fighting) that redefinition. It's hurtful that so few liberals are willing to help poor people fight the redefinition of "entitlement".

Let me put it plainly; if we let the right-wing's definition of "entitlement" stand without a fight, we are basically abandoning the poor people of this nation who desperately NEED the middle-class to advocate for them. We are leaving them to the wolves. If you're comfortable with that, well, there's not much more to say about it. But if you're not...please reconsider and join us in this fight. Entitlements are NOT bad things. They are the bedrock of social stability. They are the programs that literally stand between poverty and death. When we caved in to the right-wing framing last time, we LOST some of those entitlements...and deep poverty in America has risen alarmingly as a result. If we continue to cave, we risk losing the few we have left.

There is no way to protect Social Security without fighting to reclaim entitlements as important public goods. No matter how much we try to reframe SS and Medicare, the right-wing will NEVER let the public forget that those programs are entitlements. If we don't fight now to make entitlement a positive term again, we're conceding the battle for Social Security before its even been fought, and we're abandoning the poor to whatever starvation and misery that life throws at them.

Entitlement. It's a term of endearment for a nation that is noble enough to stand up and say, "No person should starve in America. No person should be homeless in America. No person should die of a simple untreated skin infection in America. We are better than that."

[bobbolink]

1. "There is no way to protect Social Security without fighting to reclaim entitlements as important

public goods."

THANK YOU SO MUCH, LYRIC!

Please write more about this... how you see we can fight this, and what others can do.

This is so desparately important!

I appreciate you doing this!

:yourock:

[crickets]

2. Thank you. K&R

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Thank you for posting that. You are so very right!

[bobbolink]

4. Kicking because it deserves to be read, but seems to have been abandoned.

:(

[JoeyT]

5. K&R

Nothing to add, you pretty much said it all.