President Donald Trump takes a sip of water as he delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. January 30, 2018. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Two big items were missing from President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday night: Medicare and Social Security. While these entitlement programs were absent from the President's speech, together they take up almost all of the government's mandatory spending. "The harm of neglecting them is they're underfunded," said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Tax Policy Center. "There is a cliff we're going to face in a few decades, at which point the programs won't have enough to pay their beneficiaries. Real people would lose the benefits they need."