WASHINGTON — With President Obama’s latest “speech of his life” echoing around the talk shows, Democrats are showing they won’t accept the plain truth that the economic back of the American century is broken.

The party in power, like all regimes of both parties going back to Republican President George H. W. Bush, still clings to the belief that you can grow an economy by taking in each other’s laundry.

The illusion of building wealth by selling each other hamburgers, selling insurance and trading real estate — a bustling “service economy” — is over everywhere but here.

That deceit has led to the debt bomb—the menace that everyone keeps smoldering in the closet. It has now become real enough for Obama to give lip service to.

Obama alluded to it in his State of the Union message. But he did not admit that we are paying more in interest to pay for the national credit card than we are spending on his Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The interest rate we taxpayers pay to China, Japan, the United Kingdom and American fat cats who buy our debt is about 3.25 percent — more than three times what we can get at our bank.

The White House quietly estimates that by 2019, taxpayers will be paying at least $700 billion every year to our creditors — more than the combined annual cost of our wars, and the departments of Energy, Education and Homeland Security.

Unshackle New York says the state deficit could exceed $60 billion in three years.

We are going broke. Be warned that lenders to government can foreclose unless you pay higher and higher interest rates. This eats further into the money left over for the things you once thought government should do.

These crushing debts won’t be paid with a “service economy” of trading stocks or running auto agencies or selling gasoline.

We have to build wealth anew the way China, India and Japan are — with factories, with manufacturing and total exploitation of natural resources, primarily drilling for more oil and gas everywhere we can. By the same processes that once made America and New York rich.

This will require sacrifices by everybody. Sacrifice is the very last thing politicians think about. That’s why Obama offered a handful of nebulous tax credits to small industry on Wednesday night, and claimed we could solve our manufacturing (and debt) crisis with a national export initiative.

An export initiative is a distraction, said Alan Tonelson, research fellow at the U. S. Business & Industry Council. “We need to replace the imports we consume with products made in our own country,” he said. Congress must quickly post import taxes against China for artificially devaluing its currency, Tonelson said.

China’s tactic lets it artificially peg the price of the consumer goods it sends over here 40 percent to 50 percent cheaper than if made here. It’s one way China closes our factories.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y., has proposed bills to punish China for this for five years. They die quietly. His office says the Senate has been absorbed by health care, and adds that the Democratic leadership wants to do something in earnest. I will send roses when it does.

The cynical politics of the China trade is that those who are hurt by it the most—the millions of unemployed factory workers — understand it the least.

That’s why Obama gets away with tossing old bones to the mob. Neither he nor most of his principal advisers knows anything about business. “Obama listens to [economic adviser] Lawrence Summers, a friend of Wall Street and a dyed-in-the-wool outsourcer,” Tonelson said.

With Summers around, you won’t hear Obama saying what centrist French President Nicolas Sarkozy said last week: That free trade has “weakened democracy” because it has been prioritized above all else.