Let’s tell ourselves that every dollar the U.S. government borrows and spends goes to an urgent and absolutely necessary cause.

Let’s tell ourselves that convenient lie so we can see where it has led even the healthy countries across the Atlantic Ocean. “Turmoil Spreads in Europe,” the Wall Street Journal said the other day, warning that the continent’s corrosive debt troubles now have “spilled over to top-rated nations that had been largely untouched by the crisis.”

If Congress and the White House cannot make dramatic and immediate moves to tame rampant deficits on our side of the Atlantic, they’re inviting that European contagion — and the markedly lowered quality of life it threatens — into our communities and homes.

The so-called supercommittee of 12 Senate and House members will be a convenient target for public scorn if it fails to produce a big deficit reduction scheme by its Nov. 23 deadline. But convenient doesn’t mean justified: The failure has been unfolding for years at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The supercommittee’s evident inability to spread a paltry $1.2 trillion in slightly lower (but still rising!) deficits over 10 years is only the latest symptom of our country’s chronic refusal to face facts: As a nation, we are spending far more than our revenues justify. We’re borrowing an additional $3 million a minute, every minute of every day, to support spending that the government’s income cannot.

Against that slow-mo fiscal suicide, the supercommittee’s minimum goal is disturbingly low — it’s not even 1 percent of the $150 trillion in gross domestic product that our $15-trillion-a-year economy likely will yield over the next decade.

We’ve been hoping for at least a $4 trillion reduction in deficits over 10 years, with a three- or four-to-one ratio of spending cuts to revenue hikes. News the other day that Republicans and Demo-crats on the supercommittee still were hundreds of billions of dollars apart on, yes, spending cuts and revenue hikes didn’t stoke our optimism.

We’ll keep reading, and mostly ignoring, the daily snipes that members of both parties are directing at one another — as if anyone thinks they have someplace to hide if this effort to check deficits collapses. Equally disturbing is the sly posturing as members of Congress, on and off the supercommittee, test-market ideas for again delaying serious cuts. The more talk we hear about extending the committee’s deadline, or leaving tax issues for congressional tax committees to solve later, or rescinding the automatic budget cuts scheduled to take effect if no deficits deal emerges, the more we sense that a lot of politicians are more worried about the 2012 election than about the financial future of the country.

We’re not in the room, so we don’t pretend to know which negotiators are being imaginative and which are being intransigent. We do, though, doubt that, if the supecommittee flops, either party will escape massive blame. And it’s hard to see how, after this high-profile episode, Congress would quickly find some other means of reducing deficits. As failure compounds along with the national debt, that 2012 election could be a bloodbath.

With so little time left for the supercommittee to act, we’re less interested in the theatrical posturing than in seeing results, if any. This nation’s financial future is at risk. And when you read about the debt-driven hardships even in those triple-A-rated countries of Europe, remember that . . . you no longer live in a triple-A-rated country. Last summer’s embarrassing downgrade of U.S. creditworthiness came with warnings that more downgrades could follow if Washington didn’t get its runaway indebtedness under control.

The prospect of a credit market rebellion against the U.S. is no more unthinkable than the punishment that investors are delivering, right now, to some of the most well-run governments in Europe.

On that continent, public officials and ordinary citizens are joining in the realization that their economies aren’t growing fast enough to support their costly entitlement states.

On this continent, though, many public officials and ordinary citizens remain in denial. Too many pols are stalling, hoping that some sudden economic recovery will rescue them from having to slash the deficit spending that has helped many of them win popularity — and votes on Election Days past. The 2010 election cleared many of those folks out of Congress, but many more remain. For now.

A periscope view of what’s unfolding in Europe ought to worry every Washington politician. If it did, we’d be hearing more from the supercommittee, the Congress and the White House about a “Go Big” resolution.

So far, nothing much. And Nov. 23 arrives Wednesday.