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.