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Thank you for this very interesting post. It had never crossed my feeble mind that one of the consequences of the Soc Sec Act was the enabling of of older folks to not have to work to survive, thus opening jobs for younger folks. I have read that something like 10,000 boomers are retiring every week. I am afraid however, that under the current Regime, those jobs that are opening up will not be filled.

“I went looking for the 1933 news on the reality of Social Security before it was passed”

Why on earth would you go to an FDR “fireside chat” for that purpose? As if he was going go tell any more truth than “liberals” and their “memes” (I hate even to write that despicable word). I suppose he could let some things slip, there could be windows into secret purposes, or you could find advocated what no claiming political descent from him would admit. But what you won’t find, ever, is plain reality.

Case in point, they had the gall to call it “insurance,” which to this day people persist in thinking it is, when it is absolutely and obviously not. That was a lie. What SS really is, deep down, is mostly a means of buying votes. Less so, it is about, as usual, expanding power, crowding out private prerogatives, addicting people to the government tit, making people feel as though there’s some connection between what they take from you and what they eventually give back (if anything), etc.

Another interesting bit on FDR:

A Communitarian Ethos

The Groton influence of Endicott Peabody showed in a speech Roosevelt gave at the People's Forum in Troy, NY in 1912. There he declared that western Europeans and Americans had achieved victory in the struggle for "the liberty of the individual," and that the new agenda should be a "struggle for the liberty of the community." The wrong ethos for a new age was, "every man does as he sees fit, even with a due regard to law and order." The new order should be, "march on with civilization in a way satisfactory to the well-being of the great majority of us."

In that speech Roosevelt outlined the philosophical base of what would eventually become the New Deal. He also forecast the rhetorical mode by which "community" could loom over individual liberty. "If we call the method regulation, people hold up their hands in horror and say ‘un-American,' or ‘dangerous,'" Roosevelt pointed out. "But if we call the same identical process co-operation, these same old fogeys will cry out ‘well done'.... cooperation is as good a word for the new theory as any other."

More here.

(2) Projects shall be of a nature that a considerable proportion of the money spent will go into wages for labor.

This means the projects should be as UN-mechanized as possible. People leaning on shovels instead of using earth-moving machinery. The idea that using manual labor instead of machinery creates jobs goes all the way back to the Roman Empire if not earlier.

as someone has pointed out, using seven workers to do a job that one worker with a machine could do doesn't create seven jobs, it splits a paycheck seven ways.