All we really know about America’s several financial industry bailouts and the stimulus plan is their enormous potential cost: at least one trillion in net cost to the Treasury for the bailouts, another trillion for stimulus and likely additional trillions of costly credit offered by the Federal Reserve.

These commitments will sharply curtail the ability of President Barack Obama to push for investment spending, healthcare and entitlements reform and middle-class tax cuts. They will further explode our federal debt and borrowing costs and increase our reliance on foreign capital. That will affect our economic security: the nations with increased financial leverage – China, Japan and the oil-producing countries – are already demanding more assurances about our credit­worthiness as the world’s largest debtor nation. A recent commentary in the Chinese People’s Daily noted: “The world needs to create a diversified currency and financial system ... that is not dependent on the United States.”

These massive bailouts and the stimulus package are not nearly a big enough response to the meltdown of the U.S. economy. Pouring unlimited money into an economy to high-income individuals, as was done under presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, or to banks and Wall Street now is inefficient, ineffective and unfair.

What we need instead, is a focus on creating the 10 million jobs that we are short of, for workers to be nearly fully employed. Only a jobs-based strategy can maintain our living standards and enable us to project our leadership around the world. Only this strategy, along with a reinvigorated manufacturing sector, can produce enough wealth to pay off our new debts and President’s Bush’s debt legacy.

Clearly, no nation can borrow its way to sustained prosperity. Nor does prosperity come from de-linking wages from productivity or from a government’s refusal to protect the right of workers to organize. Yet, this is what has been going on for the past 25 years. Since 1928, we have seen the greatest inequaliy in income distribution in the U.S. Our once vital manufacturing sector is now less than 30 per cent of our economy. The trade unions represent only 7.5 percent of U.S. private sector employees. Most productivity gains have gone to those at the highest income levels through preferential tax policies. We must earn our way back to prosperity by fully developing, fairly deploying and fairly compensating our human capital.

Another main cause of the economic meltdown is misguided trade policies that unfairly transferred millions of U.S. workers from export industries into less productive and often lower paying service jobs. Because of the trade deficits over the past decade, the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion smaller than it needs to be.

The Obama administration and Congress, must develop long-term plans to support manufacturing and accelerate productivity growth. They also need to embed in the stimulus package a commitment to healthy, well-educated and well-trained workers.

Because of failures beyond their control, Americans now have to purchase several trillion dollars of bad loans, and spend at least another trillion on economic stimulus. In return for their sacrifice, they are entitled to have trade adjustment assistance reauthorized and increased, unemployment benefits extended, food stamps bolstered, aid to state and local governments increased, more infrastructure investment and tax incentives to invest in plant and equipment and in domestically focused research and development.

American workers should expect trade agreements with meaningful labor and environmental standards, which forbid illegal subsidies and currency manipulation and are rigorously enforced. Every worker who wants to join a union should be able to do so without obstacles. There should be strong “Buy American” requirements related to all federal government procurement, to the degree allowed by the World Trade Organization. Finally, there should be a return to fair and progressive individual income taxation.

In light of the current situation, it is easy to see that we need all of these things for American workers to be fully employed in jobs that pay fair wages. We need them to rebuild America’s great economic engine, and end our sorry status as the world’s largest debtor nation.