Americans are struggling against a rising tide of economic insecurity that engulfs them from all sides. To date, the debate in this year's presidential election has addressed this insecurity piecemeal, with proposals to expand health-care coverage or improve retraining.

Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have failed to recognize that a patchwork of measures will not provide the comprehensive social safety net Americans need in a world of intensifying economic competition and rapid change in which individuals feel increasingly on their own.

With the nominees likely to be preoccupied with Iraq and recession-fighting between now and the November election, it will be up to individual members of Congress to frame the public policy response to the economic stress their constituents face.

Congressional candidates must articulate a broad new social compact that creates for Americans a safe harbor in an increasingly turbulent world.

Such a vision is good psychology because it will reassure an increasingly insecure people that they are not alone.

It is good practically because it would strengthen the threadbare American social safety net. And it would be excellent politics.

The looming recession has brought the economic struggles Americans face into sharp focus. Over the last generation, 95 percent of wage earners have seen their wages decline, after adjustment for inflation, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research last year.

Forty-seven million citizens already lack health insurance, nearly one in six Americans. And the fear of losing their health-care coverage is the principal concern people express when they face unemployment. To add insult to injury, when people lose their jobs, they have only a one-in-three chance of qualifying for unemployment insurance.

Struggling to maintain their standard of living in the face of these challenges, Americans have borrowed more and more money. Living beyond their means has finally caught up with them.

The ratio of household debt to disposable income, which between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s was fairly stable at a little over 60 percent, has reached 130 percent.

Moreover, Americans' faith that however bad times are today, the future will be better for their children, now seems tragically misplaced.

A man in his 30s today has 12 percent less income, after adjusting for inflation, than a similarly aged American male did a generation ago, according to a study last year by Isabell Sawhill of the Brookings Institution and John Morton of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The rags-to-riches Horatio Alger success story is little more than a myth. Only 6 percent of children born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution now make it to the top fifth.

And a third of Americans are actually downwardly mobile, making less than their parents.

Compounding people's sense of instability, a job in America is hardly a security blanket. In the early 1990s, it was thought that the average American held six or seven jobs in his or her lifetime.

An ongoing Labor Department study now suggests Americans hold between 15 and 18 jobs over their lives. That means coping with a new job, a new boss, a new work environment and a risk of making less income every three years, on average.

Twentysomethings thrive on such change. Fortysomethings -- with children and a mortgage -- crave job stability and, absent that, need help weathering the constant flux in their work lives.

But the economic safety net America affords its citizens is weak and porous. The United States is the only major industrial country not to provide universal health care. Unemployment insurance replaces only about 30 percent of the lost income of low-wage jobless workers in the United States.

By comparison, the average low-wage unemployed worker in other industrial countries gets benefits totaling 55 percent of their lost income. And Washington spends a fraction of what Germany or Great Britain spend on retraining.

All of these issues -- especially health care -- have been raised in the presidential campaign. But no candidate has attempted to allay voters' fears about the future by offering them a comprehensive vision of what can be done to help them deal with their economic insecurity.

Growing competition at home and abroad is a fact of modern life, generating great economic benefits through added productivity and affording Americans a range of goods and services their parents never dreamed possible.

The economic cost of inhibiting that competition -- through some "stop the world I want to get off" protectionist trade barriers or onerous regulation -- would be doomed to fail. But government can help Americans endure inevitable ups and downs in their pay, help them mitigate the costs of ever more frequent shifts in their careers and help them weather the overwhelming costs of medical emergencies.

This requires a new, comprehensive, three-pronged social compact: universal health care, universal unemployment insurance and universal retraining.

A social safety net built on those three pillars would provide Americans with the reassurance they need to go forward in an increasingly uncertain world. And it could be a winning theme in the fall election.

First Published: March 2, 2008, 5:00 a.m.