"Brother, you asked for it."

I'm no foreign policy expert, and I wouldn't even call myself especially informed when it comes to the state of the outside world. So I'm really in no position to offer any keen or prescient views on the situation in Iraq. But I think it's safe to say that things must have gotten better there lately, because suddenly the defining issue in the 2008 presidential campaign -- what arguably proved the difference in the Democratic primary, since there really were no other substantive differences between the two candidates -- has suddenly taken a back seat to that perennial hobgoblin of presidential elections, the economy. Stories about the sectarian carnage on the streets of Baghdad (or lack thereof) are relegated to the inside pages, read only by the most die-hard wonks, while every nightly network newscast features oppressive segments cataloging the high price of pretty much everything everybody wants to buy, and most of all, gasoline.

Every night, average Joe Sixpick earnestly, drearily informs the cameras that it's getting harder and harder to fill up, that the family vacation to the beach is on hold now, and that he's just about fed up with it. Sound familiar?

High gas prices are the story de jour, and increasingly, the loudest talking point in the upcoming election. John McCain knows it; witness his recent TV ads blaming Barack Obama for record-high gas prices. (I believe the phrase "energy crisis" is in there somewhere.) And Barack Obama knows it; he lost little time firing back at McCain, blaming him for failing to increase government fuel economy standards during his 30 years in the Senate.

Allow me, if I may, to summarize the gas-price drama, as I understand it: Gas used to be real cheap and that was great, but now all of a sudden, it's real expensive, and that's bad, because lots of people are driving trucks and SUVs that get bad mileage and so it's suddenly real important to buy cars that get good mileage. Right?

So now, everybody wants good mileage. Every car company does everything it can to play up its models' great fuel economy (even when it's not so great); Priuses are selling faster than Toyota can build them; and gas-guzzling SUVs are rusting on dealers' lots for want of buyers. And then there's the furor, just getting started in earnest, about ethanol, and how best to make it, and how high the government's CAFE standards should rise, and how fast.

But wait a minute. Lost in all the debate is a question I never hear asked: Why did it make sense, back in the Good Old Days of Cheap Gas, for everybody to drive 5,000-pound trucks and SUVs? Were gas stations giving the stuff away back then? Were oil wells gushing crude oil like 10,000 Old Faithfuls? Put more directly: Did it make sense up until recently to waste a finite natural resource for no good reason?

A quick trip back to the Good Old Days of Cheap Gas yields some interesting observations. "Cheap" is a subjective term, but I doubt anyone would disagree that back in 2003, when a gallon of regular unleaded cost $1.59 on average (per the Department of Energy), I doubt anyone would disagree that that was indeed cheap. So what cars were people buying back in that halcyon era, when George Bush was actually popular and the Iraq War looked so fresh and promising? Edmonds lists the top-ten best-sellers for '03, with the Ford F-150 pickup truck leading the way, followed by the Chevy Silverado and the Dodge Ram pickups. The lowly, gas-sipping Honda Civic, by comparison, ranks eighth, barely registering a third of F-150 sales.

Now, a quick trip over to www.fueleconomy.gov, which reports that an '03 F-150, in V-6 trim (versus the less efficient V-8) clocks 15 MPG. The 2003 Civic, equipped with an automatic, variable-ratio transmission (that is to say, not the most efficient model available) averages 32 MPG.

Now imagine yourself a prospective car buyer in 2003, facing $1.59 gas and a choice between 15 MPG and 32 MPG. And suppose you expect to drive 12,000 miles a year for the next five years, and you assume, stupidly, that the price of gas will never change, i.e., you'll continue living in the blissful era of cheap gas forever. Setting aside the obvious price differential between the truck and the car, and any insurance premium differences (ceteris paribus, if you like Latin), then you'd do your math and expect to pay $1,272 per year to fuel your F-150, and $596.25 if you opt for the Civic, for a difference of $675.75, in 2003-era dollars.

To make a long story short, unless you were a contractor who hauled around two-by-fours all day for his living, or lived at the end of a long, dirt road, buying the most popular vehicle in America was a really stupid decision. That's $675.75 you were giving away, EVERY YEAR. Just for the purposes of illustration, an annual savings of $675.75, beginning in 2003 and invested in the S&P 500 stock market (which averaged about 7.4 percent returns per year during this period), works out to a grand total, in 2008 dollars, of $4,203 by the end of 2008, assuming the stock market simply did nothing for the rest of this year. (Disclaimer: These calculations actually performed on the back of an envelop.)

So, in 2003, operating under a set of extremely conservative and unlikely assumptions, your former self would have foregone quite a tidy little sum of present-day dollars. Of course, more realistic assumptions -- namely, that gas prices might very well go up -- would only have widened the gap. And yet, 845,586 F-150s flew off the lot that year, along with a host of other big, gas-guzzling trucks. And five years later, most of them are still probably in service (even given Ford's notoriously lousy build quality). So the next time I see Joe Sixpack being interviewed at his local gas station in front of his pickup, I wish the local news correspondent would ask, "So five years ago, what made you do something so patently stupid even before gas doubled?" I'm curious to hear the answer.