Here’s a thought about how to make America great again: bring back pensions.

If Donald Trump really is intent on turning back the clock to the glory days of an America before globalization knocked the stuffing out of the US manufacturing sector, why stop at trade?

Part of what is making all but the wealthiest Americans feel so economically vulnerable today isn’t just that incomes have been eviscerated. It’s the fact that when we retire, those of us without pensions – a growing proportion, especially if we’re not public sector employees or union employees – are perched atop very, very tiny nest eggs.

Last year’s report from the nonpartisan US government accountability office (GAO) reminded us of the perils. Half of all households headed by Americans 55 and older had no retirement savings at all. While some long-term savers may have retirement accounts with as much as $251,600, Fidelity reported that the average amount in a 401k – the replacements to pensions that companies began rolling out during the 1980s – was little more than a third of that amount.

Experts suggest you should have a nest egg that is at least 12 times your income in your final year of employment. So, if you’re making $50,000, an appropriate nest egg would be somewhere around $600,000 – tremendously in excess of even the balances that Fidelity cites. Even if you throw the value of a house and some savings accounts in the mix, it’s clear that most Americans haven’t been able to save enough and/or invest well enough using 401k plans

The switch from the old-fashioned pensions to the newfangled “defined contribution” retirement plans did benefit companies, unsurprisingly. Under the pension system, the company was on the hook for managing the pension (a cost) and was responsible for paying out the benefits, come hell or high water, a major strain as life expectancies grew longer.

One of the largest pension defaults was that of United Airlines in 2005. After the airline underfunded its pension while operating under bankruptcy protection, a court agreed to United’s request to turn responsibility over to a federal agency. Since federal regulations cap what can be paid to beneficiaries, this resulted in pension payments that were substantially less than what employees would have received under the old system.

But even profitable companies are rushing to shed pension obligations, in order to reduce the prospect of having to guarantee retirement payments to their employees. The favored trend in recent years has been to sell the retirement obligations to an insurance company, essentially transforming those pension payments into an annuity for the plan beneficiaries.

The potential downside? Companies also can offer retirees a one-time cash payout: tempting for the recipients, but financially imprudent. There’s the potential for a big tax hit, and the recipients likely don’t have the skills to develop an asset allocation plan, pick an investment portfolio and manage it, if they haven’t been doing so up until that point.

But even as companies are mishandling the last stages of their relationship with defined-benefit plans (AKA pensions), their replacements, the 401ks, really aren’t working out very well for Americans, either.

Hillary Clinton inadvertently reminded us of one of the risks of the 401k when she commented in a speech last week that in a single day, “Americans lost $100m from their 401k plans.” She went on to add that “we are resilient and we will bounce back” and, sure enough, that is precisely what has happened.

But the fact remains that periods of market volatility are particularly harmful to investors in defined contribution plans. For instance, selloffs can last longer, and overlap with someone’s scheduled retirement date. At that point, they’re no longer earning and contributing to their nest eggs; instead, people have to start taking withdrawals from a pot that is much smaller than it was only a year or two ago.

Volatility can hurt investors in these self-directed plans in other ways. The plans force unexperienced investors to shoulder the responsibilities of the market as if they were trained to react to market events. And as countless behavioral economists have demonstrated, responding in knee-jerk ways to either panic or greed can be the worst thing to do – and the hardest to resist.

Meanwhile, companies have an incentive to keep the costs of managing a pension low. When it comes to the fees associated with a 401k, however, there have been relatively few such incentives. Only recently have a flurry of class-action lawsuits, involving companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, begun to put pressure on businesses to ensure that fees don’t drag down 401k returns.

As the Economic Policy Institute has noted, there’s another peril with 401k plans. Not only do some employers not offer them at all, but those who fail to put plans in place, or whose benefits are less generous (for instance, companies that don’t match employee contributions), are more likely to be those that hire low-income workers. That, the thinktank notes, magnifies inequality.

For the most part, the 401k has been a cash-generating machine for investment firms and a source of extra stress for employees. The latter have to find a way to fund them from their paychecks – when incomes have stagnated – and max out what an employer will match. Then they have to puzzle their way through the investment options, wrestling with what often feel like complex questions regarding asset allocation, risk tolerance and the best investment products. If they want professional advice, they have to pay for it.

Fans of the 401k point out that employees have full control of their retirement assets, which is great until it isn’t. If they make poor investment decisions (remember that data about the inadequate retirement savings?) or simply fail to invest, who’s on the hook? Will the US stand by and watch an entire generation starve to death in poverty as a lesson to millennials and the next generation to take retirement saving seriously? I suspect not. That means we could face a need for a kind of retirement savings bailout, the likes of which will make the bank bailout look like loose change. Corporations realize that if we’re living longer, it’s in their financial interest to make us responsible for our own retirement. Only a few Americans at the top of the income pyramid have ability to take full advantage of the new retirement savings structure.

We’ve had a 30-year experiment with this idea, in some of the most robust bull markets for bonds and stocks ever recorded. The stock market has recovered since the financial crisis and bond investments did well; if 401k plans were working, Americans should have improved their retirement position, logic suggests. In fact, the opposite happened, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security: they were further behind in 2013 than they were not only in 2007, but also in 2010.

I doubt that it’s possible to return to the days of the original corporate pension plan, especially in the 21st-century world of a highly mobile workforce that comprises hundreds of thousands of contract workers or freelancers. (And certainly, pensions weren’t perfect.) But nor is the defined contribution model – which also relies on the traditional employer/employee relationship – working out well, if the goal is to ensure that Americans have healthy retirement accounts. Clearly, it’s time to devise a new approach.