In the matter of a few hours, we’re going to see a farce, or a kabuki dance if you prefer, go down in the House of Representatives. They will vote on a bill to raise the nation’s debt limit by $2.406 trillion, one called up under suspension of the rules, meaning that it requires a two-thirds vote for passage. Indeed, it’s intended not to pass, just to create headaches for Democratic members in next year’s elections, and to “prove” somehow that a clean debt limit cannot pass, requiring major spending cuts to be added to the vote to secure that passage.

If you read the bill you see that the authors blame the President’s budget proposal, something that will not pass and does not have the force of law, for “necessitat[ing] an increase in the statutory debt.” So this is a double whammy – it shows that a clean debt limit increase doesn’t have the necessary support, AND that the President’s budget doesn’t, either.

It’s a pretty transparent trick. And so Steny Hoyer doesn’t want the Democrats to play along. He’s asking the entire caucus to vote against the bill. And being the Minority Whip, he has some pull over these matters.

Hoyer is warning his colleagues not to be “politically gamed” by Republicans and instead to either vote “no” or “present” to deprive the vote of any legitimacy. He told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that if the bill is “simply a political charade in which the overwhelmingly majority or all Republicans are going to vote no, I’m going to advise my members that they should not subject themselves to the demagoguery that would surely follow.”

So in consecutive weeks, you will have the Senate voting unanimously against the President’s 2012 budget (before he added a lot of the fiscal cutbacks, but still a mildly austere budget), and the House voting almost unanimously, in all likelihood, against increasing the debt limit. I appreciate the “a strange game, the only winning move is not to play” technique here, but in the final analysis, you have nobody in the House and Senate willing to say that the debt limit just ought to be increased and the budget ought to be proper for the current times, when there are millions of people out of work, rather than drastically austere. And this hysterical deficit debate is playing out while other countries just pass us by. [cont’d.]

Our imagination deficit is the shortfall we should worry about. We seem incapable of doing what we did in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and, yes, Nixon years: imagining how practical public action could make our citizens’ lives better, our country stronger and our private economy more productive […]

The larger and more important challenge is to figure out how we can plan, invest and compete with countries far more focused than we are on how the new global economy works. And the people most amazed at our country’s inability to do so are not armchair socialists but tough-minded chief executives.

Encouraged by Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, I spent time recently with the Wall Street Journal’s report on its annual ECO:nomics conference, published in March. Right off, the Journal’s account emphasized that China is “grabbing clean-technology market share not because of its cheap labor .?.?. but through strong mandates and subsidies to build a new export industry.” Ahem, those words “mandates” and “subsidies” don’t come out of the free-market playbook.

The report quoted Mark Pinto, executive vice president of Applied Materials, who said that in solar power, the United States is “neither the largest in manufacturing nor the largest market.” He added: “That’s very unusual.” Do we really want to lose this market?

It’s very depressing to not only see this waste of human capital, but this waste of US resources. The future is precisely what we’re losing in these budget debates, while we wait for Joe Biden to find the most clever way to cut $4 trillion from future budgets.