The future of Social Security (and Medicare) will be determined by the midterm election.

2026 is THE Social Security Election

Martin Burns and Mary Liz Burns for Common Dreams

The future of Social Security, the government program that touches the lives of more Americans than any other, will be determined by the results of the November elections. Let us explain. The Social Security program faces a funding shortfall. As ABC News reported back in June:

Social Security’s trust fund that pays retiree and survivor benefits is expected to begin running low on money earlier than previously expected, leading to questions from Americans who rely on the benefits for their living expenses. Without congressional action, the fund is now expected to begin depleting by the fourth quarter of 2032, according to a report issued Tuesday by Social Security’s trustees, the body that manages the trust fund.

This does not mean that, as some who for their own political purposes argue, Social Security is going “bankrupt.” Those who depend on Social Security (roughly 68 million Americans) do not have to worry about their checks stopping. Instead, they need to be concerned about a very significant cut to their benefits.

But know this: The reduction can be avoided with courageous political action. Congress and the president can make adjustments that will close the gap and pay out promised benefits. Back in 1983, Congress and President Ronald Reagan hammered out a solution to do just that.

Right now, there are a number of steps that Congress can take that will strengthen Social Security’s finances for today and for future generations. One of the most talked about solutions is raising the cap on the amount of income subject to the Social Security tax—otherwise called “busting the cap.” The Economic Policy Institute points out that:

Earnings above a cap aren’t subject to the payroll taxes that fund Social Security. As a result, billionaires pay the same tax as someone earning $176,100 in 2025 (the cap is indexed to the average wage, so it changes every year). “Scrapping the cap” is a popular and effective way to address Social Security’s funding gap. Nearly three-fourths of Social Security’s projected long-term shortfall would be eliminated if the cap were scrapped without increasing benefits.

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NOT A JOKE: Trump announces his DC Arch will actually be a military bunker with snipers, drones and an ammo dump

Here's his new plan:

He introduced this new idea using LEGO-like versions as props (NOT made up)

Yeah, the military needs this. Some proposed new designs

Bobby Kennedy's HHS publishes "study" linking support for LGBTQ+ rights and political violence

“I have rarely read a report that has come out of the government that is so clearly politically biased,”

This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler and Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. Meet Orion and Jasmine and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

A new study from the Trump administration is sending alarm bells through pro-democracy groups for its potential to fuel a crackdown on Americans who support LGBTQ+ rights — or anyone with left-leaning views. 

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a study that reaches a dramatic conclusion: Those who support transgender people may be more likely to justify political violence. The study also claims that those who agree with statements like “all political conservatives are fools” or “anyone who opposes gay marriage must be homophobic” may also be more likely to support political violence. 

Experts have serious doubts about the study’s findings and major ethical objections to its methodology. They say that it builds on previous pseudoscience about trans people and, ultimately, they are concerned about how the Trump administration plans to use it. 

Murder-Suicide Appears to Be Rising Among Older Americans

Most often by men against women

By Jennifer Mascia for The Trace and Chip Brownlee for The Trace

This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

This story was published in collaboration with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy, and power.

A day after New Year’s, 2025, a 91-year-old man fatally shot his 89-year-old wife in their house in Camarillo, California. He called the police to confess before killing himself. “They were inseparable for the 64 years they were together,” according to the couple’s joint obituary.

Last November in upstate New York, a 69-year-old retiree struggling with his mental health killed his 68-year-old longtime girlfriend and then himself in their home. A neighbor discovered their bodies. “I just don’t know what happened to him,” another neighbor said about the retiree. “He was just a good guy.”

Gun deaths overall have been declining in recent years, but murder-suicides in which at least one of the victims was age 65 or older are higher than ever, according to a Trace analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. At least 134 older adults were killed in murder-suicides last year, a slight rise over 2024 and the highest number since GVA began compiling data more than a decade ago. Another 85 older adults perpetrated a killing before dying by their own hand.

GVA tracks shootings through media and police reports, so it may not capture every incident. Still, it is one of the most comprehensive sources of data on gun violence in the United States. The Trace took a closer look at the murder-suicides and whether there are points of intervention for people at risk.

What the Data Shows

There were 679 gun-related murder-suicides in the United States last year. In 144 of them, or 21 percent, at least one victim or perpetrator was 65 or older.

The circumstances behind the murder-suicides of older adults varied. Illness was a motivating factor in at least 15 percent of them. In several cases, the perpetrator was the victim’s full-time caregiver. 

A couple of shootings followed disputes over inheritance. Two other shooters reported financial struggles before pulling the trigger. A few couples left notes saying the decision to die was mutual, but most shootings appeared to be unilateral actions on the part of the shooter. In many cases, the motive will never be known — not even to the families.

In more than half of the cases we examined, the perpetrator fatally shot their spouse or a current or former romantic partner. In just over a quarter, the perpetrator killed their parent or child, or another immediate family member. Family annihilations — in which someone kills multiple members of their immediate family — accounted for 16 percent of the incidents. Over the past two years, family annihilation has become a twice-daily phenomenon in the United States.

Women made up 80 percent of the victims in last year’s murder-suicides among older adults. The oldest victim was 102. Her 75-year-old son-in-law fatally shot her and her 73-year-old daughter in La Porte, Indiana, in May 2025. A neighbor said the victims had health problems and that the son-in-law had been taking care of them.

All but two of the shooters were men. The oldest perpetrator, a 92-year-old man in Mesa, Arizona, killed his 93-year-old wife and then himself at their senior group home in October. 

Several of the incidents involved couples whose bodies were discovered during welfare checks instigated by neighbors or family members, sometimes days or weeks after the killings. In those cases, a motive was difficult to discern — and in a few cases, police couldn’t even tell who the shooter was.

Only a few cases involved a documented history of domestic abuse. In August last year, a 70-year-old man fatally shot his 69-year-old wife and 40-year-old daughter at their mansion in Rolling Hills, California, before killing himself. The couple was in the middle of a divorce. Both victims had a restraining order against the shooter.

Trump claims his "high IQ" will protect us from being wiped out by artificial intelligence

We're all gonna die

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

Trump loves his AI slop

Donald Trump slapped down the idea of putting guardrails on artificial intelligence, despite increased warnings from industry insiders and outside experts about the technology’s potential dangers to humanity.

In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested that his own intellect was singlehandedly capable of regulating AI, a technology so complicated that even its own creators have acknowledged difficulties in understanding it.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote, “and the USA has that, in spades!”

Trump then claimed, without offering any details, that his administration had already “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’” and then baselessly claimed the nationwide backlash to the technology was part of a vast conspiracy theory in service of the Chinese Communist Party.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Regardless of Trump’s social media rants, there is widespread concern about the impacts of AI across the political spectrum.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, described Trump’s stance on regulating AI as “a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger,” in a Common Dreams op-ed.

Reacting directly to Trump’s Monday social media post, Sachs told Common Dreams that it was a sign that “we are in the grip of madness and puerility.”

Trump often cites his academic achievements,
lying about his placement among Wharton
Business School graduates, as proof of his "genius"

Axios reported on Monday that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will join former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon on Tuesday for a what is being described as a “Pro-Human Assembly” aimed at highlighting the dangers posed by the continued development of the technology.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), chair of Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Management, announced last week that he is opening a probe into the recent autonomous hack carried out by OpenAI agents, while also examining threats posed by the AI industry as a whole.

Calls to regulate AI have grown over the last week since Coxon announced that he had resigned from his position at AI lab Anthropic because he no longer felt it was possible to safely develop the technology.

In a social media post announcing his resignation, Coxon claimed that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and accused them of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Meeting an urgent national security need

We'll tell you his weak spot

Taking the stairs could protect your heart and help you live longer

Unless you have a heart attack

University of East Anglia

Simply choosing the stairs could have surprisingly big benefits for your heart and longevity. A large analysis involving more than 480,000 people found that regular stair climbers were 39% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 24% less likely to die from any cause than people who rarely took the stairs. They also had lower risks of heart attack, stroke, and heart failure.

New research from the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital suggests that something as simple as choosing the stairs could contribute to a longer life.

The large study found that people who regularly climbed stairs had a substantially lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Frequent stair climbers were 39% less likely to die from heart-related causes and 24% less likely to die from any cause compared with people who climbed stairs less often.

Regular stair climbing was also associated with a lower likelihood of developing serious cardiovascular conditions, including heart attack, stroke, and heart failure.

Prof Vassilios Vassiliou, from UEA's Norwich Medical School, said: "Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide -- with cases nearly doubling between 1990 and 2019. But it is largely preventable through a healthy lifestyle -- including regular physical activity, a heart-healthy diet, not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, and managing blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes.

"Taking the stairs is a practical and often overlooked way to build physical activity into daily life.

"We wanted to better understand how this everyday activity could have life-saving potential."

Are too many Americans taking antidepressants?

These days, who ISN'T depressed?

Andrew McLean, University of North Dakota

How can you take Bobby Junior seriously when
he posts this shit?

Drugs for treating depression are among the most prescribed category of medications in the U.S. – 1 in 6 American adults take them.

Some health researchers and advocates have raised concerns that too many patients are using antidepressants and that patients who want to stop taking them struggle to do so. 

One of the most prominent voices on this point is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who launched an effort in May 2026 encouraging doctors to find other ways besides antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs to treat depression when possible.

As a psychiatrist for over 35 years, including a past role as the medical director of North Dakota’s Department of Human Services, I’ve seen both the benefits and the problems with antidepressants. In my view, there are grains of truth to claims that they are overused, but the full picture is much more nuanced.

There’s a name for working families who are surviving but not thriving in Rhode Island: ALICE

Remember when they were called the working poor?

By Janine L. Weisman, Rhode Island Current

In her neon yellow shirt and pink hard hat, Ashlynn Jorge extended her arm and held her palm out to halt traffic approaching a sidewalk construction site on Kay Street in Newport shortly before 10 o’clock Thursday morning.

But the 26-year-old union laborer can’t stop the bills. 

South County numbers are lower

Jorge earns about $4,800 a month. But rent for the three-bedroom house in East Providence where she lives with her boyfriend and their two children, ages 6, and 3, is $2,500 a month. The lease on her Hyundai Palisade is $767 a month. Food, utilities and other expenses eat up the rest of her income.

It costs less for her boyfriend, also 26, to stay home and take care of their son and daughter than for him to work and pay for childcare, she said.

“Live paycheck to paycheck,” said Jorge, who gets up each workday at 4:30 a.m. “I try to give my kids what they deserve, so I try my best to work overtime sometimes.” 

The gap between earnings and the cost of basic living is the focus of a new report from the United Way of Rhode Island released Thursday morning at the same time Jorge and her coworkers were rebuilding a section of sidewalk.

Jorge’s income is well over the $33,000 federal poverty threshold for a household of four. But that still means her family is among the 1 in 3 Rhode Island households working and struggling to afford adequate food, housing and health care, unable to save money for the future.

There’s a name for these households: ALICE.

Trump regime lets sales of sawed-off shotguns and silencers become legal

Just in time for fall hunting season

By Chip Brownlee for The Trace

Silencers and short-barreled firearms like sawed-off shotguns have been heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act for nearly a century. That just changed.

Under the NFA, enacted in 1934, owners of silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and some other atypical weapons were required to register their guns with the federal government and undergo more extensive vetting. On August 5, a federal judge in Texas, James Wesley Hendrix, found the registration requirements unconstitutional and issued an injunction blocking the provision. He gave the Trump administration a week to appeal.

The Justice Department missed that deadline. So on August 13, the special regulations on silencers (also known as suppressors) and short-barreled guns were effectively scrapped for the first time in more than 90 years. 

Gun rights proponents cheered the decision. In Texas, far-right congressional candidate Brandon Herrera — known online as TheAKGuy — was among the first to buy a legal, unregistered silencer just after midnight at an event organized by Gun Owners of America. Hours later, in South Carolina, the National Association for Gun Rights posted a video claiming silencers were “flying off the shelves” at the Greenville store of Palmetto State Armory, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Great things to look forward to