Counting down to the Pennsylvania primary, it surprises me that neither Democrat is hitting hard on the relationship between the two wars we’re fighting on borrowed money, skyrocketing oil prices and our descent into recession and economic turmoil.

True, a month ago, when Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Economist Linda Bilmes published their treatise “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” documenting the real cost of the Iraq adventure, there were a few speeches noting the incredible cost and how better the money could have been spent.

But in Pennsylvania of all places, where town after town has been devastated economically, one would expect either Clinton or Obama to probe more deeply—to rub raw the sores of discontent, to paraphrase Chicago’s own Saul Alinsky.
In interviews, Stiglitz acknowledges that the stunning rise in oil and gasoline prices is due in part to the war—the only issue is how much. As I have noted elsewhere, a powerful clue lies in a 2001 Brookings Institution study.

At that time oil was under $25 per barrel and gasoline $1.50 a gallon, contrasted with recent prices of $115 a barrel oil and gasoline nearing $4. The Brookings study suggested that an interruption in the oil supply of 18 months due to some aspect of our “war on terror” would result in oil hitting $75 a barrel and gasoline $3.

This implies that the war is responsible for at least a tripling of oil prices. The ripple effect punches up the cost of heating fuel, gasoline, food and other essentials that require transportation. It is inflationary.

I am not an economist. I am an empiricist.

If someone tells me seven years ago that a war in the Middle East will make oil prices triple, and that forecast comes true, I tend to believe the hell out of that guy!

Similarly, in a now famous 2002 article in the New York Review of Books, William D. Nordhaus, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, warned that if we invaded Iraq and fought a war on borrowed money, we would inevitably sink into recession. Guns and butter didn’t work for Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and even the short-lived first Gulf War had the same negative economic result.

Does anyone doubt that we have just lived through the first quarter of a new recession?

Are we going to believe the guy who called the shot accurately more than six years ago—or the government agents who have been lying to us about the cost of the war for years? Remember how Paul Wolfowitz, who was put briefly in charge of the World Bank, said the war would be self-liquidating because it would be paid for with Iraqi oil?

Now those prevaricators are prescribing more tax cuts to end our fiscal woes.

Let’s get real: we’re spending ourselves into oblivion with this war. If it were sanely financed we would, first of all, have the funds on hand to cope with the subprime mortgage crisis, which is not a product of the war but something that compounds the problem.

Furthermore, if we had not seriously diminished our coffers, we could begin to spend ourselves out of recession by launching massive public works programs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and establishing a new, green infrastructure.

It ain’t gonna happen by passing out six hundred bucks to every taxpayer—welcome as those bucks might be to impoverished families.

That three trillion dollar war is already draining more than $10,000 from every man, woman and child in the country.

Hey, Hillary——Hey, Barack: Seems to me telling this story the right way would help your cause. Or is this too bitter a pill for Pennsylvanians to swallow?

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Don Rose, longtime strategist for liberal and independent campaigns, is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.