The most harmful effect of the fiscal crisis ”“ uncertainty ”“ is taking its toll.

The two-year Washington deadlock over stopping the growth in the federal debt, and then reducing, has caused serious harm to most Americans.

President Obama and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have been unable to agree on more than papering over the crisis. This season’s “fiscal cliff” is really just a chapter of an unhappy, long-running story.

The price of uncertainty has already been high.

The credit rating of the United States, the keeper of the world’s monetary standard, has been cut, making federal borrowing more expensive.

Businesses have slowed their job-creating investments because they have little idea about their future taxes or the spending plans of the federal government, the nation’s biggest customer.

Pensions are suffering, because investments track worries about the economy, which is greatly affected by government policies.

Economic recovery is slowed by doubts about Washington’s inability to extract itself from partisan warfare.

The public wants compromise, and any possible compromise on the current fiscal cliff has always depended on a mix of tax increases and spending cuts.

But the powerful Republican conservative bloc in the House wants no increase in the low tax rates adopted a decade ago and intended to be only temporary. They even repudiated their own House Speaker by rejecting a modest increase on people with taxable incomes of more than a million dollars a year.

Our system of government has always depended on compromise. The majority party has usually made some concessions to the minority so that it could get its plan of action adopted.

The President and the Senate majority are Democrats. The GOP has the House majority.

Conserv-ative Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican, gets it, saying, “I don’t want (taxes) to go up on anybody, but I’m not in the majority in the United States Senate, and he’s the president of the United States.”

Unfortunately, many of his fellow Republicans in the House don’t see it that way. Any elections, other than their own, seem to mean little to them. They want minority rule.

On the other side, Democrats have not demonstrated strong leadership skills. They should have taken the initiative on the fiscal cliff the day after the elections instead of wasting time lobbing impractical public proposals back and forth with the Republicans.

With a balanced comprehensive proposal on all issues, either they could have found a negotiating partner or, more likely, forced a vote that would reveal just who was responsible for the failure to agree.

Instead of shying away from a Senate vote, Obama should have insisted that the GOP would have to take the floor and filibuster, not merely use it as a threat. And, if necessary, he should have submitted his bill to the House to test if the GOP would vote it down in the glare of public attention.

The media has been little help in clarifying and explaining the issues. It seems to see its job as simply reporting on the financial debate as if it were a boxing bout between two equally matched contenders. It is almost impossible to find a clear and accurate explanation in the media.

For example, a CNN anchor this week described the fiscal cliff issue as being between Republicans who refuse any tax increases and Democrats who insist on them.

In fact, Democrats had said they would limit tax increases to those with taxable incomes about $500,000, twice the level on which they had campaigned. And Obama offered a boringly detailed series of spending cuts, agency by agency.

The only group ”“ Democratic or Republican ”“ that has said the result must be one-sided is the conservative GOP House bloc, which believes it has enough votes to prevent any result other than their drastic spending cuts.

The press has also hyped the fiscal cliff out of proportion. The failure to avoid going over the cliff would result in huge tax increases, it says.

In fact, taxes would go back to what they were in the 1990s, when the country experienced a long period of prosperity. That’s not to say it would be a good idea to raise taxes on average people now, while we struggle to get out of the recession.

The media also seldom reports that this fiscal cliff, even if avoided, is tiny compared to the yawning budget chasm.

Ahead are the problems of reducing the debt even more, real tax reform, which will surely mean increases for somebody, and controlling the net cost of entitlements.

The way the fiscal cliff has been confronted offers little hope for resolving these far bigger issues. It offers only more debilitating uncertainty.

— Gordon L. Weil is an author, publisher, consultant, and former official of international organizations and the U.S. and Maine governments.