kilolo. thank you, everyone, i would like to open it up for questions, before so doing, i would like to take moderator's privilege and ask a question myself to our panel. 2018 is the first year that we've had tax reserves, projected to have to tap reserves towards the end of the year to pay schedule benefits. what is the significance of that? perhaps we start with one of the actuaries and move on to our other panels. >> well, i guess, just on that, anytime we expend any money on any benefits or paying karen or my salaries, that results in tapping into the trust fund reserves. we have to-- we have to redeem reserves, redeem investments at any time. in 2018, almost exclusively of the drop in the tax revenues coming in, which were, as indicated, all a bit of a surprise here, based on these things. towards the idea we're going to have to redeem more in the reserves than we will be investing. the nominal reserves will be dropping partly in 2018 as opposed to 2022. that's significant. i guess from

kilolo kijakazi from the urban institute. and doug holtz-eakin, president of the american action forum. their bios are in the packets. so if you want more information on our speakers, please look there. with that i'd like to introduce steve to begin talking about the program's finances. >> great. thank you very much, ben. and karen and i are going to do as we described, sort of a tag team run you through some of the material. we have a number of slides. ben will yell at us if we're taking too much time. so let me just run through the first couple slides, karen will run through some. we'll go back and forth, to keep it interesting. because it's been said that some actuaries are not as interesting. so tag team will be better. why are we here today because of social security, but in particular the date of yesterday the annual trustees report came out? every year, starting 1941, there's always been one. why are we doing it? because the congress demands it. we do what they say. it's required that every near an annual trustees repo