What we name things is a significant driver in what we think about those things. If we call something a flower, we value it; if we name it a weed, we spray it with insecticide and do our best to eradicate it.
The same goes for our politics: social insurance implies a positive support system; entitlements create a different sense. Taxes are theft of our hard-earned wages, and asking the wealthy to pay their fair share will kill jobs.
This is precisely the point that the economists Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw make in today’s New York Times:
But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.
This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.
The shift began in the 1960s, building out of the implicitly racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The New Deal, with its broad supports for seniors and other aid to the poor and out of work, was popular enough to win Franklin Delano Roosevelt four terms and depended on support from southern whites.
Flash forward 30 years: LBJ — with a strong push from the civil rights movement — expands voting rights and opportunity for blacks. The South revolts and politicians like Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan follow, using a crime wave and the racism of many northern whites to recast social insurance programs as in-American and privileging blacks. The rhetorical shift took hold and, now, 40-plus years later, we view social insurance through the cold lens of budgets and deficits and the revenues that pay for required services as anti-freedom.
This rhetorical shift is tied to the larger shift in the public’s faith in the safety net and the political left’s ability to defend programs like food stamps and what’s left of welfare.
Reversing this rhetorical shift will not be easy and will require civil disobedience and a constant refrain on the part of a shrinking left commentariot to remind Americans of the absolute necessity of the social safety net.
Hank Kalet 
There's an all out war against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defined benefit pensions, public unions, private sector unions, public schools, public school teachers, what's left of welfare, regulations, in sum, anything that helps ordinary Americans. Just randomly switch on any of the C-Span channels, Fox News,CNBC or CNN and you'll see some billionaire railing against SS and how it's unsustainable. There will have to be cuts, they say, the retirement age will have to be raised to 70 because folks are living longer, they say. Some well groomed millionaire talking about the need to cut the throats of seniors, the poor and the disabled. I want to scream, I want to projectile vomit. We have an economic Armageddon caused by the geniuses on Wall Street and the banksters; they get bailed out but \”everyone\” will now have to make sacrifices. Translation, cuts will be made to the great social programs that keep millions of Americans out of abject destitution but let's make sure that Paris Hilton and Donald Trump get their taxes lowered even more. The unionization rate is about 11.9%, so workers are at the total mercy of employers with no bargaining power and a huge percent of workers reduced to part time employment with no benefits, no pensions, no health insurance and poor wages. Jobs are scarce so workers will take almost anything that comes along and will put up with all kinds of \”sh*t.\” Welcome to the plutonomy where corporations rule the roost.