Kent Conrad: “This is unprecedented. On Saturday morning, we were given reports that looked as though we had dodged the bullet.”

You know, we did have discussions. One of the things on this commission, because of its makeup and the diversity of views on this commission, and the extraordinary difficulty of coming together on Social Security, which we thought was the…

Social Security's financial challenge affects nearly our entire society, and the solutions will require a broad-based approach.

The bottom 20 percent of earners get a 35-percent increase over what is scheduled, a more than 60-percent increase over what is payable.

It lifts the bottom. It asks those of us at the top to take a little less of an increase than we might have expected.