This week, three major stories broke. First, President Trump canceled a visit to the White House for the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles were sending too few representatives, and Trump—angry at the possibility of being humiliated in a photo op—decided to back out of the event. He then proceeded to suggest that the Eagles had avoided his White House because they supported kneeling for the National Anthem, and rescheduled a patriotic event complete with a military choir rendition of “God Bless America” to poke them in the eye. LeBron James and Steph Curry responded by stating that neither of their teams would be interested in visiting the White House after the NBA Finals.
Second, President Trump commuted the sentence of 63-year-old convicted drug dealer Alice Marie Johnson who was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 after trafficking 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms of cocaine. Trump’s stated policy is that he would like to consider the death penalty for drug dealers. So what changed his mind here? Kim Kardashian visited the White House and lobbied for Johnson, who received her commutation less than a week later.
Finally, we found out that according to the government, Medicare is scheduled to become insolvent as of 2026, and Social Security is scheduled to do the same by 2034. More than 49 million Americans are currently reliant on Medicare; approximately 63 million Americans are currently reliant on Social Security. These two programs comprise more than sixty percent of the mandatory spending in our annual budget. And if we don’t do something relatively drastic almost immediately, we will be faced with serious shortfalls. How big will those shortfalls be? Our current national debt is about $20 trillion; if we included expected shortfalls from these two programs, our national debt would be about $91 trillion.
Now, which of these three stories got the least attention?