Entitlement

The word "Entitlement" can refer to the rights, money, or privileges that one should be allowed by law, or heredity, or work performed, etc.); but it can also refer to the expectation of one's rights to those privileges.  The word "entitlement" is used (as are the terms, "liberal," "open-minded," and "intellectual") as a derogatory term in regards to: welfare payments; fair wages; equal wages; social security payments; disability payments; student loans; and any other social program, or equalizing factor, aimed at the general well being of Americans. It helps the cause of the GOP to refer to recipients of those social services as "freeloaders" and "deadbeats" (and Reagan's imaginary "welfare queen") even when they are aware that the majority of government benefits recipients are children and the elderly.

"Entitlement" is a favorite word among those opposed to the Social Market Economy this country has exercised for over a century. Most people believe that the US has a Capitalist Economy, but this interpretation is only correct in that it is the "speech of the day" and has less to do with the actual definition of capitalism than with the strained fear of using the word "social" in a description of our actual working economic system. They frighten the uninformed with the word "socialism" as if the US does not already have social programs entrenched in its culture.

Most of the political world's super-rich are very careful not to use the "entitlement" word when referring to their presumed entitlement to extra tax breaks, exemption from government regulations, and their use of America's vast infrastructure - without paying their fair share in income tax. They believe that, because they have more money than nearly everyone else in America, they should be allowed to hide it from the tax system to which the rest of the country is forced to adhere. They feel entitled to these special privileges by virtue of their great wealth - whether that wealth came from  hard work, heredity, luck, privilege, or corporate theft. What that wealth does afford the super-rich is access to, and control of, America's lawmakers, through corporate-funded lobbying. This greed-driven policy-making has increased the disparity of wealth in the US to that equaling a third-world dictatorship. This is (or should be) embarrassing to a democratic society. 
  
(More on real capitalism and the causes and possible solutions to an embarrassing disparity of wealth, later.)