The price of a gallon of regular gasoline has hit $4 at a couple of local stations in my whereabouts, Massachusetts, and Memorial Day is almost upon us. We’re in a part of the state that relies upon tourist dollars, but with their SUVs now running $80+ to fill, those tourists barely will afford fried clams and onion rings while here. A friend of mine from the gym owns a small deli and pizza shop, and his flour costs are up 48% from the same time last year, so even a slice of pie is going to be high this summer.

In 2003, in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon adamantly insisted that the war would be a relatively cheap one. It estimated roughly $50 billion is all it would take to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, it said. The counter in the right sidebar of this site is well over $500 billion today and counting.

Economists and analysts are examining the entire financial burden of the Iraq campaign, including indirect expenses that Americans will be paying long after the troops come home. In news stories reported earlier in the year, calculations by Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remain most prominent. They determined that, once you factor in things like medical costs for injured troops, higher oil prices and replenishing the military, the war will cost the United States in the area of $2 trillion.

For perspective on this almost unfathomable amount of money, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts share of the war costs in FY 2007 were approximately $3.9 billion, based upon a study done by National Priorities Dot Org. Other uses to which this money could have been put, for purposes of comparison, include:

* 6,062,066 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year, or

* 76,274 Public Safety Officers for One year, or

* 65,456 Port Container Inspectors for One year

and these might make that number a little easier to understand. How much safer could the United States be with those Inspectors than Mr. Happy claims we are as a result of the “Mission Accomplished” war in Iraq, for instance?

The substance of this issue is overwhelming to most if not all of us, and as the Tao Te Ching suggests in Chapter 18, “When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.” And so we argue over lapel pins and the depth of one’s love of country because the chaos and the dollars involved are beyond comprehension. The harm is done merely with the asking of the question, and no answer is sufficient enough to quell doubts while we cling to something we can, in fact, understand, no matter how unfair or unreasonable the argument may be – “I’m more patriotic than you are!.”

The question of whether we are better off today than we were four or eight years ago is so trite it should never be asked again. But it is among the easiest of questions to answer today, and those responsible for making it such an easy answer most probably will be run out of town come November. When this country’s resources are financing the dog’s dinner that is the Iraq war to the tune of more than $300 million per day, we can expect nothing more of our country’s economy than what we have today: rising food and fuel costs that cause some of us to be choosing between the two each day. It is life during wartime here, and we’re paying an awful price for some bad decisions.

While the “talking heads” that are the staple of the evening cable shows gab ceaselessly of election politics as Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama jockey for prominence, one of my daughters and I turn to the real “Talking Heads” of David Byrne et al as we crank the music and sing: “I’ve got some groceries, some peanut butter, to last a couple of days . . . . . . ”