Washington. -- While presidential candidates of both major parties were wooing white middle-class voters with promises of tax cuts and other goodies aimed at taking the nation out of its economic slump, two of the nation's major advocates for blacks and the poor warned last week that the promises are misdirected and that besides, they won't do the trick.

On Tuesday, National Urban League president John E. Jacob, releasing the League's 17th annual report on "The State of Black America," said at a news conference that as a result of the recession, "you have former executives on the unemployment lines, former white-collar workers on the soup lines, and former factory workers on the welfare lines."

Black or white, poor or middle class, he said, "we're all in the same boat."

Mr. Jacob went on to reveal what he called the nation's "dirty little secret." For more than a decade, he said, Americans have "bought the myths of the right wing -- that people are poor or jobless because of personal failings, that poverty and joblessness are 'black' problems." The fact is, he said, "the victims of poverty, unemployment and hardship" are predominantly white, and whites comprise most of the nation's welfare and food-stamp recipients.

As Mr. Jacob outlined the situation, the League's report could have been titled, "The Black State of America." For certain, he said, "This recession won't be fixed by smoke and mirrors or by political grandstanding."

On Thursday, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, president of the National Rainbow Coalition -- and a two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who has announced that he won't try again this year -- issued similar warnings.

"The nation is in pain," he said. "We are in the worst recession since the Great Depression. . . . There are more poor people, more unemployed, more failed financial institutions than at any time since the 1930s."

Mr. Jackson was speaking at a luncheon opening the National Policy Institute, a three-day conference of more than 300 black elected officials from throughout the nation. The conference was sponsored by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, generally regarded as the nation's leading black think tank.

Back to Mr. Jacob: "I'm very disturbed that national leadership -- in both parties -- thinks this recession can be waited out or fixed with a little tinkering."

The Urban League president criticized "proposals for tax cuts that would drain away resources that should be used to create jobs" and -- taking direct aim at President Bush -- "trips to beg the Japanese to start affirmative action programs for U.S. exports."

Back to Mr. Jackson: "Bush got on a plane with 23 all-white, all-male multi-millionaires over 60 to go to Japan, asking for 'jobs, jobs, jobs.' . . . They demanded international affirmative action. And yet on that trip there was not one labor leader, one small-business person, one woman, one African American, one Hispanic."

Both Mr. Jacob and Mr. Jackson offered proposals for resolving both the immediate problem of the recession and the long-term problem of turning the nation's economy around.

Mr. Jacob once again proposed a "Marshall Plan for America" -- a massive 10-year, $50 billion-a-year effort. The League's first proposal of a "domestic Marshall Plan" dates back to 1963 -- and the price tag hasn't changed.

The aims of the latest proposal would be first to "jump-start" the economy out of the recession, then to revamp the nation's economic "infrastructure" by restoring its ability to create jobs, to improve its education system and to train workers.

For those who were likely to blanch at the $500 billion price tag, it was Mr. Jackson who provided an answer: "Why is Japan strong? Japan invests in Japan. . . . The Japanese have a $3 trillion, ten-year plan to rebuild their infrastructure."

Mr. Jackson suggested that the nation's military budget could be "cut in half without cutting defense," and that the money saved could be used to "reinvest in America" through a program of reindustrialization.

At the same time, Mr. Jackson called for a program of "corporate workfare."

"When corporations receive a tax break, they have a responsibility to reinvest in the community that gave them the break," he said. "Yet today, there is no incentive for them to work for what they get. That's corporate welfare.

"We need corporate workfare, [to] make corporations invest where they live," he said, adding, "If they are not prepared to reinvest in America, then we will take them off the tax-break roles."

Mr. Jackson offered a contemporary example of the nation's infrastructure "in trouble." When a water main broke in Washington last week, he said, the Rainbow Coalition's offices had to close for two days. "Not only Rainbow, but CBS was affected, [along with] the Federal Communications Commission, the banks, maids, doctors and the homeless," he said. "When the water main breaks, class distinctions become irrelevant. We either stop the flood together, or drown apart."

The possibility of drowning was also a theme common to the two leaders. When Mr. Jacob was warning that the recession had put everyone in "the same boat," he rowed his boat to its metaphorical limits: Although whites "are in the bow of the boat, damp, and worried whether it will stay afloat," he said, blacks "are awash in the stern of the boat, knee-deep in water and in danger of drowning."

The Urban League's latest "State of Black America" report emphasized that the "relative inequality" of black Americans' economic status has become "a permanent feature" of the nation's economy.

David H. Swinton, dean of the business school of Jackson State University in Mississippi, who wrote the report's section on the economic status of the nation's blacks, measured their "relative inequality" by what he called the "three-fifths rule": For at least two decades -- that is, since Mr. Swinton began to measure it for the Urban League -- the annual per capita income of blacks has remained at about three-fifths the income of whites.

"The permanence of this disadvantaged status implies that it is perpetuated by the normal operations of the American economy," Mr. Swinton wrote. "Thus, in the absence of strong and consistent intervention, we can project continued poverty and inequality as the permanent economic status of the African-American population."

The report also pointed out the sort of political challenges that Mr. Jacob's "Marshall Plan" proposal is likely to face, particularly in a presidential election year.

In the report's chapter on "African American politics," Dianne M. Pinderhughes, a University of Illinois political science professor, wrote that as a result of such issues as the two-year struggle over a civil rights bill and the the nomination of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, the civil rights coalition is "split and in disarray on the policy front," and "agreement on new goals and strategies has become more difficult to achieve." The Urban League, for example, supported Mr. Thomas; Mr. Jackson opposed him.

Finally, there are those white middle-class voters. They are being courted as the darlings of the national electorate, as presidential candidates in both parties appear to agree that they hold the key to election this fall.

Mr. Jacob was asked at his news conference about the possibility that his proposal might not be regarded as a priority among middle-class voters. "I have heard that middle-class people are angry and that what we are seeing is the rebelling of middle-class people to their plight," he replied. "If middle-class people are angry because of 18 months of recession, they ought to try being black with 400 years of oppression."

Mr. Jackson, however, took a politician's tactical view. The black vote, he said, contains the potential margin of victory for a presidential candidate. There are 20 million eligible African American voters, he said, but seven million are unregistered, and 9 million did not vote in Mr. Bush's 1988 election victory over Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis -- "the margin of victory in any election."

Mr. Jackson's conclusion: "We must raise black voter registration by 25 percent. . . . When we have wielded our vote, we have won. When we have done less than our best, we have lost, and the nation has lost as well."

Arch Parsons, a former Sun Washington correspondent, writes on minority affairs.