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Ted Benna, who three decades ago seized on an IRS loophole to transform American retirement savings, says he’s proud to be “father of the 401(k).” He also thinks he created a monster.

From the article...

The consequence of all the complexity is twofold, he says. First, employees felt they could be more active investors. “There is too strong a potential for employees to do the worst thing ever, which is moving in the wrong direction, panicking when things are bad and cashing out after they have been battered.” Secondly, the current plans induce “a kind of gridlock – employees get so overwhelmed they do not participate – they do nothing,” he says.

Education didn’t work to stop employees from sabotaging their own futures, he contends, but legislation might. “We need a legislative mandate that when you change jobs, the money needs to be retained in a retirement account – there cannot be an option of ‘here’s a check, you decide,’” Benna says. He also advocates mandating all employees be auto-enrolled in the plans, and that their contributions be automatically increased one percentage point per year to a maximum of 10% to 15%.

This guy is part of the retail investing industry, which is kind of rigged against the retail investor (rube). It's goals:

a) get more business from rubes with very little money (the retail investor); get every poor slob out there to have money sucked out his paycheck and invested in "funds" he is hawking.

b) move all market risk to the small retail investor - even though the SEC and all it's regulations were formed under the guise of "protecting" the retail investor. They get paid commission based on a percentage of invested assets, not based at all on gains or losses. The scam thickens.

c) keep the small retail investor stupid. what investing always boils down to at the end of the day is understanding a p & l, balance sheet and business operations. get the rubes looking at fund performance and listening to all sorts of gibberish instead of knowing how to evaluate a business and decide when to buy and sell a stock or a bond. Which, in reality, is much easier than evaluating what's going on with "markets", funds, etc., - which have portfolios of investments ! If I can't evaluate an investment in a single company - how can I evaluate an investment in a fund that is investing in myriad investments ? I don't, I just trust them until I get scared and pull out. If you keep the rube always investing in funds - and afraid to buy individual stocks - he's trapped in your fund. And you profit even if he loses money. Sweet.