Dovie is a 63-year-old dough divider at the bread plant I own outside Lubbock, and I set her night schedule around the smaller retirement income the modeled benefit-reduction package would give her. Birdie is a 67-year-old soak-rag at my tannery outside Wausau, Wisconsin, and I wrote her shift card through age 70. The loaf you bought last week passed through Dovie’s divider; the leather belt in your closet came off a hide Birdie soaked. Andrew G. Biggs’s National Review essay, “The Hidden Fiscal Dividend of Social Security Reform” reports that the Penn Wharton Budget Model projects GDP 12.1% above baseline by 2060 under its benefit-reduction package, which raises the full retirement age from 67 to 70. That is 1 public fact about millions of people. I don’t need to own the model, the government, or 2060. I own the 2 floors where the promise becomes a shift. Your payment bought Dovie’s 3rd shift and Birdie’s extra hours. I keep $0.11 a loaf and $0.07 on every hide. I bought a sharper bench knife and a sharpened razor with the difference. God bless my arithmetic, your breakfast, and your household budget.

Let me make this easy to follow. I’m going to ask you the questions a payroll clerk asks, in the order a payroll clerk asks them, and I want you to answer each one out loud. 6 questions. Take them in order. I’ll wait.

Question 1: What happens to Birdie’s check and Dovie’s check if the government cuts the promise? It shrinks. The full retirement age rises from 67 to 70. In payroll language: they retire later, and they retire smaller. The model gets the applause. Dovie gets the shift.

Question 2: Who makes up the difference? Birdie and Dovie. 1 hour at a time, Birdie on the lime line and Dovie at the divider, at the rates I set. Not the government. Not the trustees. Her. Them. Take your time with this one. It is the only question that matters.

Question 3: What do you get out of it? A belt, cheaper. A loaf, cheaper. Put 2 promises side by side, and don’t skip to the end, because the end is where the margin is. Promise 1: her check is smaller. Promise 2: the wage I set can get smaller, because a smaller public promise turns her into somebody who can’t walk away. The model’s other road is a higher payroll tax. You pay 12.4% on every check you earn, and the model has that road going up. I don’t need that road. I need the promise to shrink. Put your own paycheck next to that. Don’t move it.

This is where the people who call themselves serious stop counting. The law has 2 faces. One has a government seal. The other has flour on Dovie’s sleeves. A public retirement promise is a wage subsidy, and every employer is already collecting it. The promise does the work first so the wage can stay small. Cut the promise, and total hours grow even as the individual wage needn’t.

Genesis 3:19 tells us that bread will be earned in sweat. It says nothing about who owns the roster. James had the wage complaint written down before I had a spreadsheet. In the translation I keep by the bed:

“Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” — James 5:4, King James Version

The verse is old. The payroll sheet is newer. The verse says the wage belongs to the worker. My ledger says it belongs to me until 70.

Question 4: How much protection do I buy? None. Change the floor, not the law: Birdie soaks hides outside Wausau; Dovie divides dough outside Lubbock. One is measured in hides, one in loaves. Different industries, identical arithmetic.

I refuse a second pair of hands on Birdie’s lime line. A second wage would make the hide too expensive. I refuse the respirator that would keep the lime dust out of her lungs. It costs less than the belt in your closet. I keep $0.07 on every hide she soaks. I could have spent that margin on another pair of hands, or on the respirator. I spent it on the razor.

She rinses the lime from the creases of her hands before she clocks out, and the clock pays for neither the rinse nor the time. My shift card calls her a soak-rag. By which I mean a woman with 2 hands in the lime so the hide does not rot before it reaches you. I don’t say it twice.

For Dovie, I refuse 1 set of heat-rated gloves costing $68 because the oven room leaves her fingers cracked. The $0.11 a loaf margin buys a sharper bench knife. I could toss $0.11 into the wastebasket. I don’t waste a margin.

At 3:03 a.m., sweat has darkened Dovie’s shirt. I don’t release the divider for a drink. The oven schedule can’t wait, and neither can I.

I eliminated the paid rest break because 20 idle minutes made the oven utilization report look bad. The oven schedule is spotless now. What Dovie does with the rest of her day is outside my production report.

Don’t rush to call this cruelty. Cruelty is an emotion. This is a production system.

Dovie’s body is an input.

Question 5: Can you get rid of me? No. Don’t bother. Here, let me make it easier for you. I am not 1 owner with 2 plants. I am a syllabus.

I wrote Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization. Chapter 9, Exercise 9-4: take a worker at 67 and price the wage. Then take the same worker at 70 and price it again. The answer goes in the column, not in your feelings. I’ve never had to explain it twice. When the page comes back with the worker still on the line at 70, I write Excellent in the margin, and I mean it.

For 30 years, I have graded managers into this arithmetic. They now sit inside the firms that set your wage. One of them priced the job you are afraid of losing. You think I am 1 unusually thoughtful man? I am a syllabus. You can’t fire a textbook.

Question 6: What does the country get? Penn Wharton says people work longer and save more when the promise is smaller, and the country grows. My company pension has already ended. It made my payroll sheet shorter. The younger workers who replace Birdie at the lime line are not on my labor sheet. I haven’t looked at the replacement roster. I’ve already scheduled next month’s lime line.

That package will make this ordinary. Workers with thinner retirement promises and unchanged bills will fill my hiring queue. I won’t need to advertise for extra hands. The state will do my recruiting for me. That is labor supply: 1 additional shift with no recruitment fee.

By then, the lesson will have escaped this page. The next plant manager will hear that workers respond to reduced retirement promises by offering more time. He will add shifts and call the result adaptation. The model will be cited as proof. The bread will be warm. Dovie’s forearms will be red beneath her sleeves.

By then, the smaller paychecks that buy my labor are also the paychecks that buy my bread. I haven’t opened the 2060 sales file. Why would I? The model gets applause, and my roster stays full. I find little to improve in a spotless schedule.

Question 6 has an answer: 12.1% more GDP by 2060. Birdie’s hands get the lime, and I get the hours.

At 7:07 a.m., Dovie clocks out. At 7:10 a.m., the next divider clocks in.

Her shift ends.

The schedule does not.

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.