To travel around America today is to find a country also deeply concerned about education, competition, health care and pensions. It is a country worried about how its kids are going to find jobs, retire and take care of elderly parents. But instead of focusing on a new New Deal to address the insecurities of the age of globalization, the president set off on his second term to take apart the old New Deal, trying to privatize Social Security, only feeding people's anxiety. It won't fly.

If this is how Mr. Bush intends to use his political capital, that's his business. But if he had a vice president with an eye on 2008, I have to believe he or she would be saying to the president right now: "Hey boss. What are you doing? Where are you going? How am I going to get elected running on this dog's breakfast of antiscience, head-in-the-sand policies?"

Tom Friedman pulls no punches in this latest column.

In case you missed it, Lawrence Kotlikoff's The Coming Generational Storm is now available in an updated paperback edition for only $11.53 at Amazon. Sample chapters (including the new foreword by the authors) are available from MIT Press. You may recall that "Storm" was named one of Barron's 25 best books of 2004 and was a forbes.com top ten business book for 2004. If you can't read, "don't have time for a book", or simply prefer moving pictures to written words, you can watch a one-hour presentation by Kotlikoff.

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(Burns offers Homer a check for $2,000. All he has to do is sign this form.)

Homer: Wait a minute, I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.
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On a related topic, How Scary Is the Deficit? When China decides to stop funding the war in Iraq, the GWOT, your education, and your next McMansion, will you still vote for the politicians who have to double your income taxes even as they undo the New Deal? (Oh, you didn't know? Get wise to the impending meltdown; sell your house before it's too late.) But don't be too quick to lay all the blame on your elected officials; they can't help it. You see, political ideology is genetically transmitted:

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors.

The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes.

We urge political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.