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Ten years ago, we were ending a decade of sustained prosperity in which middle-class Americans, and particularly minority Americans, made big gains in real income and wealth. Those were the Clinton years. Now we are in the middle of an era of not only stagnant real incomes for most Americans but a vast erosion of benefits and security. These are the Bush years — good for Halliburton and Blackwater, and bad for hardworking Americans.

Ten years ago, we were talking about retiring the national debt. Now we are talking about public and private debts of an unprecedented magnitude, financed by foreign governments which can hold our economy hostage — or buy it up piece by piece. That is the Bush legacy to America’s economy.

Ten years ago when the tech bubble burst, the losses were mainly on paper. Now our losses are in homes, health care, pensions, and jobs. A decade ago, investors lost the illusion of pain-free, perpetual super-profits. Today we are ridding ourselves of the Cheney illusion that “deficits don’t matter,” and the Bush illusion that you can borrow, deregulate, devalue and subsidize your way to growth by letting moneyed interests feed at the trough of government favors and borrowed money.

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We’re now as many years away from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War. But we’ve been responding to transformations in our economy with tinkering around the edges of past policies. It is now time for progressives to match Franklin Roosevelt’s vision, not just mimic his rhetoric.

We need fundamental change — not bite-sized ideas that are poll-tested, sound-bite ready and destined to be mere footnotes to the times we live in. It’s time we end the era of incrementalism and begin a bold new age in progressive politics.

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Over the last six-and-a-half years, we’ve witnessed in Washington a remarkable backwards-leaning experiment in which our environmental, tax, budget, trade, regulatory, labor, and social policies have been almost entirely subject to the most short-sighted interests of the most privileged Americans, and the most influential corporations.

They smear their critics by waving the flag of class warfare, while themselves all the time waging an assault on the middle class and the workers struggling to join it. What America needs is neither class warfare nor business-bashing but a battle for common sense, and an end to the reverse class warfare of the current administration. Thomas Jefferson’s credo should again become the foundation of our strategy for prosperity: “equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.”

And nowhere has that credo been more absent, or has the assault on the middle class found more favor, than in our tax code itself. Taxes have never been absent from the debate between citizens and their government. When King George chose to raise taxes on paint, paper, and tea in the American colonies rather than tax those in Britain, he unwittingly lit the fires of revolution that burst into flames just blocks away from this hall in the Boston Massacre.

Just over one hundred years later, no less a Republican than Teddy Roosevelt said that “the first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.” America has always stood for shared sacrifice — and fundamental fairness.

No wonder Americans are fed up with a system where the idea of shared sacrifice has been turned on its head.

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And if we want more Americans to take the risks that spark our economy, we can’t hold them back at the starting gate with students leaving college burdened with mountains of debt. Two-thirds of college students graduate with $23,000 in student loans.

After World War II, we invested in those who kept us safe from fascism, and I believe we ought to be making the same kind of deal by sending young people today to work to save post-Katrina New Orleans from extinction and to become Big Brothers, Big Sisters and mentors in communities of need.

It’s high time we made a new deal with America’s young people, with a new Service for College program — if you serve your country for two years, we will cover the cost of a four-year public university.

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These are the choices we must make to create an economy that works for all Americans again. But more than these choices we must restore a fundamental social contract.

Everyday millions of Americans get up and go to work to a job that brings with it a pension, health care, high wages, and safety standards. But fewer and fewer of these workers have joined a union. Let me tell you something, they all owe those benefits to the labor movement in our country.

What was true in Roosevelt’s day is just as true today: we must promote the right of employees to collectively bargain for better wages and benefits — at home and abroad.

There’s nothing anti-business about being pro-union. And there’s nothing that contributes more to a socially responsible corporate community than workers who know they have a place at the table in key corporate decisions.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has pursued the most strident anti-union policies in memory. I doubt they’ve appointed one judge who has voted for workers one time in their lifetime. Then how can they talk about spreading democracy to other countries, and then tell workers that they don’t have the right to sign a card and elect a union to bargain for a better wage here in America?

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44 years ago, a very different kind of president, John F. Kennedy, went to Pueblo Colorado and assured America that a “rising tide would lift all boats.” ... No, we don’t live with the same economy that President Kennedy talked about — as he once said, “the world is very different now.” But the ideal he spoke of must endure. The economy will never be the same as it once was, but America always needs to stay true to America.

Today our economy is living on borrowed money, and on borrowed time, and both will run out soon if we don’t get serious about changing course in Washington.

We must end the assault on America’s middle class and we must begin to make our economy fair again. The great American middle class doesn’t ask for much, but it counts on: leadership that honors work as much as wealth; and leaders who will make economic growth not a spectator sport, but a common endeavor.

Our mission is clear and the cause is just: Health care for all. Energy independence. A tax code that works for working people. Stop making a mockery of the phrase “ownership society.” A fair shake for the workers who ultimately create our wealth. And a society where wealth comes with responsibility, and not just a ticket to power and privilege.

All these goals are within our grasp if we really want them. Those proud Massachusetts patriots of 1776 didn’t plead for permission to govern themselves, and they didn’t wait to be told what to do by those who misgoverned them. They acted, and now so must we.