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"I want to confront problems, and I will," President Bush said in welcoming newly elected members of Congress four days into the new year. "I'll call upon Congress to take on big issues, and I look forward to working with members of both parties to do just that."

Unfortunately, the president seems not to comprehend that the biggest problems facing the nation today - a war on terror bogged down by the Iraq quagmire and troubled federal finances - are largely of his own making. Instead of confronting those problems meaningfully, Bush seems fixated on undermining Social Security, on widening further the growing income gap between affluent and average Americans and on demagoguing away the nation's persistent health care problems by blaming them all on greedy medical-malpractice lawyers.

Regarding Social Security, the president either fails to understand the numbers or is deliberately misrepresenting them. In fact, the system has the financial assets to sustain itself for decades. If there is a problem (and there may not be one), it is relatively small and fixable - unless, that is, Bush succeeds in his plan to divert Social Security revenues into private accounts.

Far more precarious are Medicare's finances, stressed by the growing demands placed on the program by an aging population and advances in medical technology. Yet on this, the president is strangely silent except to call for capping medical-malpractice awards, which at most would make only a dent in the problem.

Meanwhile, Bush shows little sign of being willing to confront the consequences of the ill-advised and ill-planned U.S. occupation of Iraq. Maybe this is because such blunders, once committed, are horribly hard to undo. The choice may well be either to maintain indefinitely an increasingly unaffordable U.S. military presence in Iraq or to declare a bogus victory and cut and run after the elections there.

Nor does the president appear much interested in confronting the big budget deficits engendered by his tax-cut favors for the rich. Until the president abandons his goal of extending and expanding those cuts, his occasional talk of deficit reduction should be dismissed as empty blather.

Bush's idea of confronting problems, as he enters his second term, apparently is not to solve them, but rather to create new problems and worsen existing ones.