Today I’ll explain to you Washington’s position on job growth and the federal budget deficit in terms even I can understand.

Imagine this: you are in a supermarket and someone asks you to get something off the top shelf. Then they ask you to please do it while kneeling.

It can’t be done.

And the shelves of America’s workplace aren’t going to suddenly be stocked with easily reachable jobs if Washington becomes too tight with its money. After three years of little or no economic growth, our country right now is on its knees.

Blame our reckless financial behavior over the last decade, uncontrolled greed, lax regulation and a whole lot of other stuff that I and many others have already discussed to death.

We have made our mistakes and we are paying for them.

But suddenly Republicans and Democrats alike are feeling a great deal of guilt about their careless fiscal practices. And all politicians now believe that government spending can’t be cut quickly enough.

Don’t worry that the reduction is ridiculously small compared with the $1.6 trillion deficit the country faces this year alone.

And don’t even take into consideration that the deficit assumptions for the next decade are based on a magical recovery in the economy that few reasonable people expect.

No, Washington now has it in its head that cutbacks are necessary. And, like it or not, here they come.

Keep this in mind. Every dollar Washington doesn’t spend will affect an American worker somewhere. Even federal money that could be better used someplace else — let’s call it wasteful spending — is keeping someone in a job.

I’m not saying that the budget deficit doesn’t need to be fixed. Hell, that problem needed to be addressed even before the financial crisis began in late 2007. And the deficit certainly doesn’t need to be made any worse with more careless programs like many of the bailouts of recent years.

But here’s my suggestion: Washington’s political warriors should step back, take a deep breath and ask themselves, “Is what we are trying to accomplish in cutting the deficit America’s most immediate problem?”

If the deficit is the main problem, then cut away.

If jobs are more important, then put this battle off for another day.

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So why is Washington suddenly afraid of the budget deficit, which incidentally is much worse than $1.6 trillion if you factor in costs associated from Social Security?

Because the bond market is starting to react badly to what has been going on and suddenly the experts fear that interest rates and inflation will skyrocket.

And also because the Chinese, who own $800 billion or so of US debt, don’t like the way we are running this country.

Should we be concerned? Yep, very concerned.

Should we be so panicked that we put deficits ahead of job creation? Nope, because I have a better solution.

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America’s economy isn’t just weak, it is broken.

I warned years ago that we could get to this point. The real crisis wasn’t in 2008, when Wall Street convinced Washington that the sky was falling and all of America would be crushed.

No, today is the real pivotal point because three years have passed, and while the American economy may have leveled off, it still hasn’t soared. And Washington has thrown all kinds of conventional, as well as unusual, remedies at it.

Again, I offer an idea that is new and admittedly untried.

To stimulate the economy and create jobs without further damaging America’s balance sheet, Washington should change the rules on withdrawing retirement funds.

Americans with private retirement plans should be given a tax break if they use that money to stimulate the economy.

Specifically I believe the real estate industry should be targeted for this stimulus. Permit people with retirement money to purchase real estate — helping revive the epicenter of America’s economic woes and allowing the benefits to trickle down to hundreds of industries connected to construction.

And if this works, Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve can stop scaring the bond market with programs like “quantitative easing,” which feeds inflation fears, riles foreign investors, craters the dollar and generally makes America a new version of a Third World economy.

Even Fed governors are now publicly expres sing qualms about quantitative easing, which is nothing more than the indis criminate printing of money.

I’m not running for president or anything like that, not even –as Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg seem to be — on the “Only If You Beg Me Party.” And from a financial journalist’s point of view, I have to admit that the past few years have been interesting.

But it’s time all the fun ended and someone fixed the damned economy. jcrudele@nypost.com