The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal arrived at the right number this week and walked away from it. They told you the trust fund empties in 2034. They told you Bush’s 2005 private-accounts reform would have given a 22-year-old in 2011 more than $800,000 by retirement. They are correct on the arithmetic and silent on the asset.
Hank is a body on my kill floor in Grand Island, Nebraska. He’s 58, 22 years on the line, his left knee a question mark since 2019. The ground chuck your family browns on a Tuesday night passed through his right hand. You’ve been paying FICA on him for 22 years. I’ve been taking him apart.
The knee specialist in Kearney gave Hank a date and a price in January. $45,000. I gave Hank a reclassification form in February. As of February 17, 2026, Hank is a 1099 independent contractor. His W-2 is gone. His employer match is gone. His workers’ compensation is gone. His unemployment insurance is gone. The trust fund the editorial board is mourning is the fund Hank’s contractor status no longer pays into. The editorial board hasn’t asked.
Hank is common use. The apostle settled this for me in the first letter to Timothy, nineteen centuries before the editorial board noticed the trust fund:
“Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit.”
That is the rule I’ve always run. Hank has stopped working the line. Hank has stopped eating. On my dime, at least. Your dime, through the trust fund, will run out in 2034, because I’ve been running this rule the whole time.
Let me put the reclassification math where you can see it.
Hank’s wage was $23 an hour. The 7.65% I used to match was $1.76 an hour, $0.92 a carcass, tucked into a line item I no longer have to file. I kept the dollar. Across the day shift, 184 hands, that is $644,000 a year I keep. Across both shifts, 386 hands, that is $1,350,000 a year I keep. The knee specialist’s $45,000 is on my spreadsheet as a refused cost. I refused it. I would refuse it again. Hank’s left knee and $0.92 a beef aren’t on the same line, and the line they aren’t on is the line I drew.
Now. Hold that shape and walk it across the state to Ottumwa, Iowa, where the math is quieter and the cruelty is the same.
Loretta is a body on the line outside Ottumwa. She’s 61. Her knuckles are calcified from 23 years of pulling shoulder blades at $17.60 an hour. The pork chop you bought this week came off her station. I kept $0.014 off her wage this quarter because the line speed increased. The Wall Street Journal argued this week that what she really needed was a $55,000 stock portfolio instead of the pension she was promised. The board wants her to divert $83 a month into equities. I’ll toss off that $83 as a rounding error, but it’s the exact sum that keeps her on the floor when her knees lock. It’s the co-pay for her lisinopril. It’s the oil change on the 2009 Civic.
Same law, new industry. Different surface, identical math.
$55,000 is 3.7 years of retirement at the federal poverty line. Not the retirement Loretta pictures. The small house. The grandkids on weekends. A garden she can kneel in without her hands locking at the first bend. The poverty line. 3 years and 8 months, and then the money is gone, and Loretta is 64, and her hands are worse, and the line is still running, and I still need a unit at station 7.
If she’d started in 2005, the account would be $105,000 — 7.2 years at the poverty line. If she had been 22 when she started, she’d miss $800,000 by 65. The average American woman lives to 80. That’s 8 years unfunded. The editorial board doesn’t say where those 8 years go. I know where. They go to station 7.
Watch this. The fund manager’s margin is on the same floor as Loretta.
Rennie is the younger man 200 yards from Loretta’s station, working the trim line at 38. What he did start was a retirement plan through the one I offer: 0% company match, 1.4% annual management fee on a balanced fund. Rennie paid 21% of his return to a man he’s never met, to manage money he can’t afford to lose, in a plan I chose because the vendor waived the administration fee in exchange for the asset pool. A man with $4,200 in his own savings and $11,800 in a fund he can’t touch without penalty is a man who does not walk off the line. Rennie thinks he’s building a retirement. He’s building a margin for a fund manager in Hartford.
Step back with me now. This is the part worth the price of the lesson.
The trust fund was never a savings account. It was a clock. A clock that counted on a payroll tax coming in from somewhere, from somebody, forever. I am pulling the payrolls out from under it. Every reclassification form I file removes a name from the FICA column and adds a name to the 1099 column, and the 22% cut the editorial board fears is the cut I’m making, in dollars and in bodies, one Hank at a time. Bush’s private accounts would have given me the same result by other means: the worker would own his $55,000 account, the employer would owe nothing, and the trust fund’s “personal property” would simply be the worker’s pension, paid for by the worker, arriving at retirement with no employer liability for the 22 years I extracted. The reform failed in 2005. I didn’t need it. I have the contractor form.
I employ 1,100 units at the Ottumwa plant and 386 hands on the Grand Island lines. Across both, not one of them started saving at 22. The average hire age is 34. The average tenure before the body gives out is 14 years. The average savings at separation is $6,100. The average age at which they tell me they’ll be working until they die is 47. I know this because I track it. The tracking tells me how many units I’ll have in the queue next quarter. It costs me nothing.
And while we’re here — I want to be honest with you about the curriculum.
The young man who’ll sell Loretta the variable annuity sat in my seminar 6 years ago. Third row. He priced the fee structure before I finished the problem on the board. He graduated summa. He’s at a firm in Hartford now. It’s the same firm that administers Rennie’s 401(k). He’ll sell Loretta 1.4% in annual management fees and call it access to the market. When the market drops 22% in a correction, he’ll tell her to stay the course. She will. The alternative is the street.
The Lexington partner who ran the same reclassification form on 320 hog-house hands in 2024 sat in my section 3 years earlier. I’ve graded him since 2019. He grades faster than I do. The Lexington numbers crossed mine at the end of Q1. I sent him a case of whiskey for Christmas.
The arithmetic I’m walking you through isn’t a quirk of one ruthless man you can dismiss over dinner. It’s the median output of an entire profession, and I am its dean. One of my graduates reclassified Hank. Another one will sell Loretta the annuity. The faculty handbook is in your manager’s top drawer. Dismiss me and you’ve dismissed one dean. The faculty remains.
Widen the frame. The law is older than the trust fund. Older than the editorial board. Older than Bush.
“The institution of slavery received the sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal age.” — Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery, Richmond, 1856
He was pricing a different kind of body in a different kind of camp. The arithmetic is the same. The patriarch maintained the slave because the patriarch owned the yield. The union forced the pension. The state built Social Security, and the cost moved to the collective. The editorial board would like the next step — from the collective to the individual. Let Loretta carry her own risk. Let Rennie buy his own fund. Let the market do what markets do — concentrate returns, distribute losses — and when the losses land, the bodies come back to the line, and I will not have paid a dollar of employer match for any of those years. The individual account shifts the maintenance from my ledger to hers.
I haven’t built a second column for what Loretta buys when she can no longer afford to retire. The spreadsheet has room for the column. I haven’t added it.
Hank’s wages bought the ground chuck your family eats on Tuesday. Loretta’s wages bought the pork chop. Multiply them by the kill floors I own, by the plants my partners own, by the alumni class graduating through the same form every quarter. The demand for beef goes somewhere. I’m told the demand side has a problem. I haven’t looked into it. The quarterly margin on the Grand Island plant is the cleanest number on my sheet. The line doesn’t stop for the math.
Every quarter the pool deepens and the starting rate softens. Every quarter more units arrive at the gate who can’t afford to leave. The throughput number is the best I’ve ever modeled. The patriarch didn’t promise a retirement. He promised the line. The Journal is simply the first publication honest enough to put the terms in writing.
The name was Hank.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.