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The political fight over America’s ailing economy is dominated by one word: debt. For most Americans, however, the real problems are jobs and growth-we don’t have enough of either. Yet our political system seems incapable of tackling the true crisis.

Republicans, to be sure, have called for big changes-witness Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” But his proposals would take us back to the tax-cutting, deregulatory spree of the last decade, when gains mostly went to the richest (as is true again today) while the economy went down in flames.

President Barack Obama, in response, talks about “winning the future” and has proposed critical steps in the right direction. Yet he is having a hard time getting even Democrats to put aside the debt obsession to focus on jobs and growth. And he has yet to lay out the kind of bold proposals needed to tackle today’s massive jobs shortage and rebuild a strong middle class.

These challenges, however, are not beyond fixing. Recent research-detailed in a report published Tuesday-points the way toward effective solutions. In that report, which is being adopted as a national reform agenda by some of the nation’s biggest civil rights, labor and community organizations, we lay out an evidence-based model for how to create shared growth. We call our model “prosperity economics.”

Prosperity economics shows that growth doesn’t drip down from the rich, but bubbles up from the dispersed innovation and productive capacity of the entire economy. It also shows that government has a crucial, indeed essential, role in fostering that innovation and capacity. There is no inevitable trade-off between creating a dynamic economy and fostering a society of widely distributed growth. The reforms we need to grow richer are also the reforms we need to encourage greater equality.