I try to tell my 80-year-old mother this, but it just ends up in an argument. She stopped working when I was born in 1971. She and my dad got two checks until he died at 74 in 2008 (he'd retired about 9 years earlier). Since then, she's gotten only his check (over $2k a month). She doesn't even call it social security. She calls it her paycheck. And she really thinks that because she and my father paid into it, she deserves it. I've showed her the numbers and how she got everything they paid in years and years ago and it doesn't matter. They paid in and they were promised and that's how it goes. And she's a conservative Republican too.