Social Security has been spending away its nest egg, paying out more benefits to retirees than it takes in from workers since 2010, thanks to the cushion provided by the administration's trust fund. By

233, that cushion will be flat, the trust fund will be empty. And if the only money available

for benefits is what's raised each year by payroll taxes, retirees could only receive 79%

of what they've been promised throughout their working live. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.

This year's annual report from Social Security trustees got a lot of attention.

But for anyone who's been tracking this, the biggest surprise may not be the looming deadline,

but the fact that Congress has not made it a top priority to do something about it.

Teresa Gilarducci is here to talk about the options available to lawmakers and how all of this

might affect the financial well-being of our rapidly aging population. She is professor of economics

at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She serves as director of the Schwartz Center

for Economic Analysis and the new school's retirement equity lab.

Teresa, welcome back to think.

Oh, so good to be back. Thank you.

Pretty much every American alive has only known this country since the establishment of Social Security.

How did people get by in their retirement years, or what we now think

of as the retirement years before this program existed?

Oh, great question, because we have to remember how bad it was. The United States was really

late in creating a social security system. You know, European countries had it maybe 20, 30 years before we did.

And before we had it, this was before the New Deal in the 1930s, people either worked,

more than half of men died in their boots.

They just never did retire.

The rich, of course, always did have a period of leisure,

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