Your question is a good one. Most qualified retirement plans allows for postponing the taxes until retirement time and then taxing th income and growth at that time. The tax rate most likely from looking at history will be higher. Roth IRAs and Indexed Universial life program allow for tax free retirements.  Now if an employer is doing a matching and products have an index to save employees from market drops you can use a combination to give the employees the best program.