That was a huge mistake. Getting retirement and putting them onto an investing club hoping that businesses will always increase profits, while we have contrary tax laws that push businesses to SPEND all potential profits and encourage hiring and growth. At the same time we say “oh but to fund 401k, the companies have to LOOK good so people keep “investing” their retirements. In order to do that, businesses need to extract profit and pay dividends - reducing the money that can be used instead for growth, since we don’t tax business expenses like cost of goods sold or employees (payroll tax is not the same because it’s the same for every employee, not pro or regressive like income tax).

We have two different incentives pushing opposite directions, invest money, helps our economy, or profit-taking, pleasing the investor class, but does very little for our general economy (no incentive for the profits will be re-invested at all when they can use financial instruments to multiply the invested money)