I’M ENTITLED TO MY ENTITLEMENTS

8/24/10

As we drove our oldest daughter to Hawkeyeland for her freshman year of college last week, we listened for part of the trip to Mike McConnell on WGN 720 Chicago. Mike has a pretty good show a good part of the time, though his topics have an increasing tendency to wander into the banality and outright silliness that plagues talk radio when it tries to transcend its traditional political junky audience. For example, one of today’s topics, as I cut the lawn, was “What really makes you shiver?” The conversation centered around such things as scraping a blackboard with one’s nails, taking the cotton out of aspirin bottles, and biting into the surface of a peach. Who has time for such nonsense? I quickly went back to WBBM Newsradio 78 rather than numb my brain with such idiocy. But, having said that, Mike McConnell, when he stays on serious, or even quasi-serious, topics has a good program. But I digress.

Last week, the discussion on Mike’s program centered on entitlements and attacking the federal deficit. One of the callers opined that she felt very strongly about cutting entitlements, that, indeed, we had to cut entitlements if we were ever to get spending under control. She said that she had gone so far as to call Senator Durbin to express her earnest desire that he do something about entitlements. (Talk about a useless exercise, but I digress again.) With the next sentence, this caller expressed her dismay that her mother, who was in her ‘80s, had to pay a co-pay for her prescription medication. Why, she lamented, couldn’t Medicare pick up the entire cost of the prescription?

McConnell said nothing; he is too nice a guy, I suspect. But one got the distinct impression that he was as dumbfounded by this caller’s comments as was I.

This caller’s comments encapsulate two of the reasons that any effort to get our spending and our budget under control no matter who sits in Congress or in the White House. First, even, or perhaps especially, the most ardent foes of “entitlements” have little idea of what an entitlement is. The words “entitlement” and “welfare” are not synonyms.

Second, the only consensus we have achieved, or ever will achieve, on entitlements is that it is a fine idea to cut the OTHER guy’s entitlements. We have, after all, earned OUR entitlements (There might, by the way, be something to that argument in many cases.), which are somehow never called “entitlements,” and OUR entitlements are completely meritorious and beneficial to society while the OTHER guy’s entitlements just make him a lazy lout and tear at the very fabric of society.

We are, ladies and gentlemen, doomed.