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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

If you'd like to know why NASA is getting less and less funding and can expect this trend to continue, see this chart from Five38/NYT:

https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/16fi...

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Here's the article from which that graphic is sourced:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-i...

I'm shocked that they are so brazen as to frame one of the categories as "entitlement spending". The neutral terms for the contents of this category are Medicare and Medicaid, pensions, retirement benefits, Social Security, welfare, and unemployment. You can also call them health insurance, retirement insurance, and unemployment insurance.

Technically, retirement benefits are things to which retirees are entitled to. Workers took lower-paying government jobs after weighing the value of the salary now against the value of the promised pensions later, or contributed to Social Security (not so much a choice by individuals, but a choice by the government of the past) which allows them to take the benefits of the program now. This is the literal meaning of the word "entitle", not the pejorative that it's become.

As far as health care and welfare go, I would argue that simply being human in a wealthy, modern society ought to entitle people to the right not die on the streets of preventable causes. I don't regret my tax dollars going to those causes, except insofar as they exceed actually providing health care and instead enrich the bureaucracy and megacorporations that are paid to provide it.

> I'm shocked that they are so brazen as to frame one of the categories as "entitlement spending".

What's wrong with calling them that, those are entitlements.

> Technically, retirement benefits are things to which retirees are entitled to.

Which is why they're called entitlements.

> This is the literal meaning of the word "entitle", not the pejorative that it's become.

It's only a pejorative to some and those same people think liberal is a pejorative. Nothing remotely wrong with the word entitlements, it's not pejorative to anyone who understand what the word actually means.

"Entitlement spending" is a fairly common term used to describe government spending that benefits the people directly. I've seen it used in all kinds of places. I haven't heard it used in a derogatory way, though maybe I just haven't noticed.

It is very frequently used as a derogatory term on conservative radio and television shows.

"Entitlements" is a technical term that's been used for quite some time (including the usage of the word in the original Social Security Act).

There's plenty of cases of speech manipulation, but this isn't one of them.

Maybe "they" aren't brazen, and just use the word to mean "things people are actually entitled to"?

They're using "entitlement" as in "things people are entitled to".

Even rich societies require some function which controls the population. The more you shield people from natural forces, the more you will stress the system as impact of those forces builds up.

Entitlement: the amount to which a person has a right

Not to be confused with the other definition which has negative connotations.

Don't forget that their entitlements promise them much more than their contributions could ever pay for.

I don't think that it's correct to say that NASA is getting less and less funding. At least according to the data on Wikipedia, NASA's budget has been between $15B and $20B per year in inflation adjusted dollars for the last few decades, and so increasing a bit most years to account for inflation.

The only budget metric that has been dropping has been NASA's percentage of the federal budget, and that's more due to the huge growth in federal spending rather than any decrease in the amount of funds that NASA has available.

What a terrible chart. By overlaying rather than stacking the areas it looks like almost all federal expenditures are now "entitlements"! Here's a stacked area graph since 1962, which makes clear that we've basically traded military spending for health care for old and disabled people:

http://www.painting-with-numbers.com/download/document/184/1...

But most federal outlays are entitlements. Breaking it out by entitlement type doesn't change that fact. Military spending presumably includes space/rocket related R&D.

And the total as a percentage of GDP has gone up extensively, which a stacked graph doesn't show.

And the issue with this is the health care system, where the private companies get all the healthy individuals who can pay premiums, but the government has to pay the bill for those who can’t.

Single Payer would be less expensive than this.

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