This election season I’ve heard much about entitlements. Each ‘side’ claims (correctly) that the other side lauds entitlements for their base. The dems visibly help those less fortunate as a way to bring everyone up. The GOP helps those with wealth gain/keep more of that wealth so that it may ‘trickle down’ to those less fortunate. I fall along the democratic spectrum, but I am not shy on admitting that I have benefited from Republican created loopholes. While I didn’t pick up a nearly-free Hummer while that loophole was open, I am pleased the mortgage loopholes remain open.
These entitlements, these privileges are so ubiquitous that is easy to forget they even exist. I’m interested, both as a sociologist and as a middle-class American to really dissect these entitlements and find out how much the state is covering for us all. Watching the chaos unfold in Greece and elsewhere leads me to believe that any genuine challenge to our hidden entitlements will cause wide scale unrest. Imagine discovering that the government was keeping our oil prices artificially low, say a dollar or more. If prices jumped a dollar, we would lose our minds.
And then we would pay it.
The fact is, we don’t have control over the entitlements given, and should we be forced to relinquish them, we would take it. We would moan and gripe and complain about how ‘our America’ is vanishing, but we would stay put. See, nobody is going to leave America, because we have it ingrained in out psyche that it is the greatest place on Earth.