Last week, during one of those nights in which the fate of the federal bailout plan remained uncertain, I had a dream.I dreamed that in searching for a workable and realistic solution to America’s most threatening economic crisis in 75 years, Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington suddenly saw things clearly.Finally, leaders understood the simple facts: that since the 2001 recession, the richest 1% of Americans have garnered most of the gains from our economic growth, while most American families have had no gains at all; that inequality in family incomes threatens inequality in opportunity, reducing upward mobility and directly assaulting the cherished notion that any American can rise from rags to riches; and that the political power of financial interests can easily entrench policies that give short shrift to the needs of the broad middle class for good paying jobs, health care, and retirement security.In my dream, what ultimately moved our leaders to act—to help the middle-class and to preserve the existence of the middle class—was the realization that the bursting of the housing market bubble could wipe out half the wealth of typical families.Rising unemployment and sinking home prices threatened to bring down the whole house of cards based on debt-financed consumption. This, leaders saw, could lead to a vicious circle of falling wages, plummeting consumption, and plunging investment—followed by more job losses.At the end of my dream, a bipartisan group of former labor and treasury secretaries and Federal Reserve chairs proudly announced what they called “America’s Job Market Rescue Plan.”“America’s economy will grind to a halt,” they declared, “unless Main Street can share in the benefits of a strong economy.”“Yes, yes, yes!” I cheered in my dream, waking myself up.Jolted back to reality, I remembered that it was not the crisis on middle-class Main Street that galvanized Washington and led to a proposal for spending $700 billion.It was the crisis on Wall Street. And unlike the plan of my dreams, the plan finally passed by Congress last week props up the American economy with a strategy focused on financial markets, not job markets. What Congress did is not sufficient.Just as Americans need new financial market regulations to catch up with the changes in our financial markets since the 1930s, we also need a Job Market Rescue Plan that updates our labor market policies. The Job Market Rescue Plan should restore broad-based opportunity and help ensure that middle-class consumer demand expands steadily to keep the overall economy humming.What should a Job Market Rescue Plan include? How about a more powerful economic stimulus? This stimulus could repair our roads, bridges, and sewer, water, and transit systems; invest in the green and clean economy; and provide training as well as unemployment benefits for jobless workers, raising skill levels and improving American competitiveness.How about a real living wage so that all workers can live on what they earn?To get there, we could raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour now and then increase it at the same rate as productivity grows. That way even our poorest workers would enjoy a piece of an expanding economic pie and help sustain consumer demand.The Job Market Rescue Plan could also build career paths into the middle class in local service industries. The fastest way to create these career paths, and a living wage for tens of millions of workers, would be to give workers in each local service industry—supermarkets and retail trade, office work and janitorial services, health care and child care—the chance to join an area-wide labor union.These service workers are the heart of the “new middle class” just waiting to be created by the right Job Market Rescue Plan. Unequal income growth has become the rule in America since globalization kicked into high gear in the 1970s. But income inequality that undermines the American Dream doesn’t have to exist.As the reaction to the financial market situation makes clear, what matters most in a crisis is political will. If our leaders can unite to save Wall Street, they should muster up the will to save Main Street. We—the American people—should demand it.