In an age when faith in most institutions has cratered, Americans still love Social Security. But they’re anxious about the future of the 90-year-old retirement income program and how changes to it might affect their own personal finances and those of their parents and children.

With good reason. Around 2033 the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund (essentially a credit balance at the Treasury) will run dry. At that point, the Social Security tax dollars flowing in will not be enough to pay all the benefits. If Congress doesn’t act, retirement checks would have to be sliced 23% across the board.

This past week, I moderated a Forbes members event on The Future Of Your Social Security Benefits which covered not only that big cliff, but also practical issues such as how Social Security income is taxed and how the program’s current arcane benefits formulas work. (You can find even more advice in the stories below.)

Former Forbes editor William Baldwin, who writes often about the intersection of investing, taxes, retirement and government policy, pointed out that even if Congress doesn’t solve the Social Security financing problem in a timely fashion, it has a “stopgap” to head off a 23% benefits cut: borrowing some more money and adding to the deficit. “Probably the politicians, after exhausting all other possibilities, will do what's right,’’ he observed. “And what’s right means something like this: They're going to increase taxes a little bit. They're going to increase the full retirement age from 67, gradually. They're going to cut benefits a little bit for people who have large incomes. They won't probably do any of these........

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