Fortunately there are no political references in this story so we can avoid that debate, please. This article on yahoo finance lays out how Social Security works and the types of payments people in the US receive, using people as examples and not just statistics. I thought this might be of interest to our non-US members in particular....
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tightwire-act-living-only-social-154206642.html
best,
Lulu