Welcome, everyone. I'm Romina Bacha, Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy here at the Cato Institute,

and today I'm joined by my colleague Emily Eakins, Vice President and Director of Polling at Cato.

Emily, thanks for joining me to talk about your latest survey. Great to be here.

So your team, Emily,

conducted a survey in October that we've just released. Can you tell folks a little bit about what they should know about how this survey was done? Well, the main point for our survey is we

want to understand what Americans really think about Social Security

and why they think what they do. So this really is going deep. This is not your typical Social

Security survey that just asks people, do you want to cut benefits? Do you want to raise taxes? We

really dig deep and understand, do they understand how the program works? Do they know what it is?

Do they know how it started? What do they think it should be?

Like if they were just coming up with this idea from scratch, what should it be? And then we get into

reforms. And so I think this is really one of the most comprehensive surveys ever done on this topic of

social security because we really look at all these different angles. So we partnered with

UGov, which is kind of the gold

standard for these types of web-enabled surveys. And we conducted this survey, like you said, in

October, and we have a new survey report that really analyzes all of the numbers.

And from my perspective, this survey couldn't be more timely because Social Security turned 90 years old last August.

And at the Cato Institute, we published a book co-authored by me and Ivana Natchkabia on reimagining

Social Security because the program, now 90 years old, will be insolvent as late as 2032.

That's less than seven years from now.

And if Congress allows that to happen, there could be across-the-board benefit cuts of almost 24% that

could hit seniors. So we do have to have a debate about what are the options before Congress.

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