This book, hailed by such giants of the economics profession as Paul A. Samuelson and Daniel McFadden (both Nobel laureates), can be condensed to this: Because of the looming crush of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security costs, the United States is on its way to bankruptcy. Indeed, say Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, and Burns, a personal finance columnist for the Dallas Morning News, we're already bankrupt, but cooking the books so as to keep it quiet.

One consequence will be, they say, the inevitability of reneging on the promise that those 401(k) retirement funds we've all been banking on will be taxed at lower rates when we retire. Forget it, they say. Pay your taxes now, while you've got the money to do it, via the Roth 401(k) alternative. Or maybe the government will intentionally create inflation, they suggest, so that the big bill for baby boomers will be paid with an intentionally enlarged money supply.

Using surprisingly glib language for an economist-they must be Burns's words-the book reminds us: "The most common way to renege on official debt is to create inflation. For a quick tutorial in how to do it, just drop by heaven, purgatory, or an even deeper location that may be housing former president Nixon. Ask him to tell you how he reneged on official debt to pay for the Vietnam War. He'll tell you that he sold bonds to the public to get the money to pay the military. Then he got his buddy Arthur Burns at the Federal Reserve to print money to buy back the bonds."

I think I counted something like 14 references to printing more money in the span of this book's 247 pages, not counting notes and index. I got the message. Indeed, it began to irritate me. Did this economist not know that most money in "circulation" is never printed? It is, rather, a buhzillion electronic ledger entries and checkbook balances, largely created through private and governmental borrowing, a miracle of the fractional reserve monetary expansion system.

But more on that digression later.

Having spent seven chapters saying over and over again that we're all going to financial hell in a hand basket, the authors reveal their prescription for personal salvation in chapter 8: forget the fiction of tax-deferred 401(k) plans; pay off your house before you retire; and buy gold.

That's it.

Well, almost.

The annoyingly repeated threat of federal money printing really began to grate on me. So I found Kotlikoff's e-mail address and shot him a note, beginning the dialogue with a question about the need to pay off one's home when some financial advisors are recommending the opposite. He actually wrote back. Wow. "Give me a call," he said. "We can talk about it." More wow: a best selling author who invites interchange with readers.

I called, and asked my mortgage question again.

"Have you ordered our financial planning software?" he asked.

Oh, jeez. I had been had.

Maybe Kotlikoff sees the future perfectly clear and has precisely the right prescription. But I can no longer take him at his word. Somehow the discovery that he-like everybody else-is trying to sell me something cracked open his credibility.

Yet he probably called his own forecasting home run on this point: The Federal Reserve ceased announcing the M3 figure in November 2005. M3 is the cumulative amount of money--of all kinds, printed and unprinted-in the economy. Critics of the quiet Fed move say it was intended to keep inflationary facts out of our collective economic psyche. Financial analysts saw a massive money supply increase in October.

And oh, yes. Kotlikoff was using the "print money" threat metaphorically, he told me, as a way to short-hand all those things the government does to influence money supply, like massive borrowing.

As accurate as the book seems to be on the coming generational storm and the in-progress inflation to pay for it, it's the prescription part-the part they want me to order from their Web site-that keeps me wondering.

It's worth a read. But read others for perspective.