Someday, we may get government-for-grownups from Washington — but not any time soon.

The debt ceiling “crisis,” like the earlier government shutdown flap, was a manufactured exercise. Nobody truly expected the United States to default, and only zealots thought it wouldn’t have devastating consequences.

The debt ceiling itself is a legal fiction, created in 1917 by a Congress leery of large war bonds. The ceiling has been raised many times since – no less than seven times during the George W. Bush administration, without notable Republican objection.

The real point of the exercise was for Republicans to decry the debt they did so much to create under Bush. Ten years ago, they enacted an ill-advised series of tax cuts, an unnecessary war in Iraq, and, for good measure, a major new Medicare prescription drug benefit, completely unfunded.

By doing so, they eliminated the fiscal tools needed to fight the next recession, which turned out to be a whopper. Instead of the surplus Bill Clinton left behind, Bush produced chronic deficits even amid the last decade’s modest economic growth, in turn built mostly on an explosion of private debt.

The deficits of the Obama years have been caused almost entirely by the automatic spending recessions produce – unemployment benefits, food stamps, Medicaid — coupled with the slump’s reduced tax revenues. Although our leaders rarely take time to explain this, federal deficits during recessions are a good thing. They counteract the contraction of private spending, making recessions shorter and less severe.

But deficits during periods of economic growth are a bad thing, which is why the Bush legacy is so hard to overcome. When we really needed spending to stimulate the economy, it wasn’t available, and Republicans, plus a few Democrats, made tax cuts the preferred stimulus; economists generally see tax cuts as less effective than direct spending in overcoming slumps.

So now we have started reducing the federal deficit before we’re sure the economy as a whole – as opposed to the economy of multi-millionaires – is recovering. It was telling that when Maine Revenue Services analyzed recent modest growth in state sales tax revenue, it came primarily from high-end retailers, not Walmart or K-mart. The middle class doesn’t have much to spend.

One mystery concerning the current occupant of the White House is how little he asks for when repeated GOP-induced crises occur. Counting the warm-up last December, when Barack Obama broke a campaign promise to extend all the Bush tax cuts, the “shutdown” episode of spring, and now the debt-ceiling wrangle, he’s produced only one win for Democrats; that was the extension of payroll tax cuts and expanded unemployment benefits for one year, ending this December, even as the millionaire cuts keep going.

In the latest round, the first scheduled $900 billion in cuts are balanced by no new revenue at all.

And that’s a problem. Federal taxes have fallen to their lowest level since the Eisenhower administration, and we have a lot of important programs – including Medicaid and Medicare – that weren’t around then. If the federal government is ever to balance its books, it has to collect more revenue.

Republican congressional leaders know this, even as they insist that closing a single tax loophole – corporate jets, outdated farm subsidies, oil drilling preferences – is a “tax increase” they’ll never support.

It will fall to the president to treat the American people as adults. And Obama continues to resist.

In his defense, it’s still a bad time for a tax increase, with the economy sputtering and unemployment above 9 percent — unthinkable, not so long ago. But it’s an even worse time for spending cuts, including those Obama has agreed to.

The president surely knows this, yet continues to speak and act as if conservative extremists are the only people he needs to satisfy.

Large majorities of Americans are ready for higher taxes on the rich, the only group to have achieved recent economic gains. They also believe deficit reduction should include spending cuts and tax increases. Why revenues are nowhere in the current plan is another mystery.

The Big Myth is that tax increases are always bad for the economy. The numbers refute that claim. Growth in the 1990s, after Clinton’s budget containing a rare tax increase, was higher than either the 1980s, after the Reagan tax cuts, or in the 2000s, after Bush’s cuts.

For people supposedly sophisticated about money, Republicans can be awfully naïve. But the jury is still out on whether another Democratic president can convince them to grow up.