Wow that means that every citizen in the US is on SS? Wonder who is cashing all those checks.
It should be possible to find out very quickly how many of those SS checks go out of the country. When US retirees move out of the country and go to, say, Mexico, they can still receive their SS bennies but they wouldn’t count in the US population number at that point. And there are US retirees all over Europe. One needs to know the numbers of domestic SS retirees as well as the overseas number to make sense out of the comparison?
And notice the SS guys want to do away with paper checks. That should make the count pretty easy?