The $3 Trillion Answer

What's related to the explosive price of oil, the expanding Federal debt, the decline in your IRA's value, the erosion of your home equity, the rising numbers of jobless Americans, the dwindling funds returned by the Feds to cities and states, the growing foreign takeover of weak US corporations and the recession now spreading through every nook and cranny of the American economy?

That $3 trillion in US taxpayer expenditures and long-term costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Iraq alone is costing $12 billion upfront each month, so don't expect that $600 rebate check you can blow on a small-screen HDTV to right the ship or ease the economic pain that will keep your personal financial decline tied to the troubled national and international fiscal picture, for years.

You can't have cut taxes and committed to billions upon billions of new expenditures and longer-range military medical costs without it all catching up to and sapping the rest of the economy.

Even if the Democrats take over next year, the fiscal and geopolitical mess that needs to be fixed will take the better part of a generation - - and that assumes a relatively trouble-free next ten years.