If Congress doesn’t take action on Social Security’s budget shortfall, the trust funds will be exhausted in 2032, and benefits for more than 70 million recipients will have to be cut by 22%. This will have a huge impact on the estimated 20 million people with no other source of income. Yet Congress appears stuck, unable to agree on how to proceed, with no serious prospect of a breakthrough.

So what if, instead of only talking to their fellow Congress members about how to solve the problem, they consulted the American people?

We, at the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), have been doing just that for years through surveys that ask Americans to address the Social Security shortfall. We present them with a range of possible reforms and explain how each would affect the budget shortfall. Most recently, we conducted this survey with nearly 20,000 Americans in 39 battleground states and districts as well as nationally.

What we have consistently found is that majorities of both Republicans and Democrats support proposals to address the shortfall. And these proposals are not out-of-the-box ideas, but are drawn from real proposals in congressional legislation and from the Social Security Administration.

Americans overwhelmingly support........

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