Hollywood has some legitimate competition — the United States Congress. Their latest feature film “Debt Ceiling: Armageddon” was filled with comedy and fantasy, but left most Americans reaching for the handkerchiefs after it mercifully came to an end on Tuesday night.

The deeply divided House and Senate reached a “compromise” — a double-kick of the can — and President Barack Obama rubber-stamped the spending cut measure that — here is the fantasy part — will result in an additional $7.1 trillion in unsustainable U.S. debt.

For weeks, stuffed shirts in D.C., with eyes on their own political futures and the wishes of high-priced lobbyists, perpetrated a fraud upon the people of this country. They used class warfare, pitting the producers against the consumers. They used feigned anger at one another. They dragged out the theater of the absurd until the last possible second, with a willing media accomplice playing a key supporting role. They threatened Americans with a national debt default that would cripple the world economy and, possibly, lead us into a reincarnation of The Great Depression.

When finally a deal was struck, they paraded in front of television cameras glad-handing and thanking their “friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Big words that said little were ballyhooed in an obvious attempt to fool an uneducated and uninformed electorate. After Obama staved off “Armageddon,” the world stock markets tumbled and continue to tumble.

All that was accomplished with this piece of legislation is to give elected officials with a crippling disease — an addiction called spending — 2.4 trillion more dollars to throw around as they see fit. Would anyone even dream of walking into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a truck full of whiskey, leave the keys and say, “Be responsible”?

No indeed.

America does not have a revenue intake problem. It has a group of self-proclaimed elite driving the Treasury, and ultimately the country, into complete financial ruin. Unsustainable will be the word of the year one day very soon — as in, our promises and obligations are simply “unsustainable.”

Congress knows it. The president knows it. We should know it.

And given a golden chance to do something substantive, to limit the addicts and put a halt on the printing presses, Congress and the president did what has, sadly, become normal. They put off the toughest of the tough choices for another Congress and another president. Sooner or later there will be no more cans to kick, no more excuses to make and no more feigned anger shown ad nauseum on every news station from Mississippi to Maine.

In 16 months, “Debt Ceiling the Sequel” will come to a theater near you. It will include many tears, fake politician smiles and very few thrills. Anyone who knows about the film industry understands, the sequels usually pale in comparison to the original.

God help us.