401(k) plans were a way to give rich people, who were already going to invest that money anyway, a tax break for doing so. This was a common theme of the Carter/Reagan* era for you young’uns. They were also a way for employers to avoid having to support fixed benefit pensions and thereby reduce compensation (i.e., retirement benefits) to employees (cutting back on retirement benefits was another theme of the late 70s and 80s). The advocates of these plans never even thought about middle class workers. They–you–didn’t enter into the calculations at all.

And now we have an entire generation of ‘citizen investors’ who have been played for suckers: