What are the Entitlements Today?

Editorial by Will Hoffknecht
Publishing Editor/Founder

When looking at the news, both local and national, it is not uncommon to hear the word “entitlement” when referring to a number of different things. The Republican party often marches to a constant barrage of claims that entitlement spending is causing all the problems we are facing. This drumbeat has been constantly banging since Reagan was in office and has led us down a path where we are today, a state where an unelected, unintelligible oligarch, eugenicist, and possibly the worst person alive, Elon Musk, is using those marching orders to inflict cruelty and pain on the hard working people of the Central Valley.

Entitlement just means something that someone is owed or has rights to. This means that as an American citizen you are entitled to due process when accused of a crime. It also means you are entitled to the protection of the first amendment. It also means that if you were born in California, you are entitled to all rights and privileges of being an American citizen. When the Republican leadership speaks of entitlement spending though, they talk about the costs that we pay into and out of to help people and institutions. One such institution is Social Security. Another is Medicare. These are programs that we as both people and companies pay into in order to supply our society with access to services that attempt to make the lives of all of us on the ground level better in some small way. Before Social Security the majority of the poor were senior citizens. If Republicans succeed in breaking these entitlement programs such as Social Security, we will be going back to a time when being old means being homeless.

After promising not to touch these programs that so many of our friends, families, and neighbors need to survive, the leaders in charge are now calling it “fraud” and “waste” and illegally cutting funding for these programs. These are programs that legally exist for the benefit of the people but which Trump, DOGE, and the Republican collaborators have decided to chop in order to try to justify tax cuts for the largest companies and richest people. These are the class of people that don’t need these cuts. They like to claim that if we cut taxes for the rich they will “create more jobs” and spur economic growth. This belief in “trickle-down” economics has always failed though. The rich already have the greatest ability to do these things. They are already in a position to start businesses, innovate, and pump money into the economic engine so why would we need to reduce their taxes to do so? Every time we cut taxes on the rich, the people on the ground level, the workers like you and me and our children, end up paying for those increases. For some context on what this means, analysts predict that this “trade war” tariff battle will cost normal American families $5,200 per year in cost increases and inflation which will turn into tax cuts for Trump, Musk, and their billionaire friends of an estimated $132 billion dollars. It is these  factors that have led us to a spot where the wealth gap in our country is now larger than it was before the French Revolution, and the leadership just want to make that wealth gap bigger to satiate their own greed.

This leads us to a discussion around the other type of entitlement - the sense of entitlement, the idea that people are owed things that they aren’t really owed because of some warped expectation of reality. This is where the rich, the land owners, and the landlords live. They believe that if they have money and wealth they are due certain things, they are entitled to them. One example is the idea that “well I create jobs so I should get laws changed to make it easier for me to run my business”. Another one would be “Brock Turner is just a young white boy with his whole life ahead of him. We shouldn’t ruin his life and hold him accountable for making a simple mistake” when that simple mistake may be assault, theft, rape, manslaughter, or even murder. The farm owners here in the valley suffer this same sense of entitlement whenever they spend millions lobbying against workers rights and fair wages for the underserved but vital laborers. The people on the ground sweating to keep us fed are the real farmers. We know who is really doing the planting all throughout the Central Valley and it sure isn’t the people who own the farmland in the majority of cases.

Add this to the simple fact that business owners and landowners also have a greater voice in our political chambers. They have access to win seats on local councils and boards grants them access to a larger voice in who gets access to what entitlements. You can be sure that they look to their own pocketbooks and interests before working for us, the people who do most of the living and eating and breathing and fostering of the economic engine here in the 209 and the 559. Whenever a large company like Foster Farms or Gallo uses their clout to get tax breaks but pushes back on unions, that is them using their riches to steal entitlements for themselves. This process is how the rich become the oligarchy.

Every time the upper classes and oligarchs use their entitlement to reinforce and grow themselves, they are taking it from someone else. That person is you and collectively it is all of us. Tax breaks for the rich means that we all have to pay a little more later to make up for it. The need to pay for services doesn’t go away, it just shifts the cost of paying for it from their own pockets, the ones who have the most ability and benefit the most of it, to us, the ones that need it to survive. Legal entitlements aren’t a bad thing and so many of our neighbors rely on them to make it day to day. The false sense of entitlement that comes with being born with privilege is the type of entitlements that need to be ripped away as those are the type that really cost us.

Will Hoffknecht is the Publishing Editor of The Valley Groundswell. Will was born and raised on a farm in Merced, traveled all over the US, and currently resides in the town of Patterson, California.