Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Recalling the admonitions of conversing with laymen on the topics of politics and religion so as to avoid the specter of conflict or the implication of insult, a new topic of avoidance might now be added to those conventional taboos. Certain aspects of economics have attained the status of topics to be avoided in polite conversation. There appears to be a presumption that debt does not matter and the economic future will be, must be, exponentially larger than the present. Logically, if debt represents a claim on the future, then ever larger amounts of debt represents ever larger claims on the future. The growth of debt appears to carry with it an assumption that the future will be larger than the present, not just a little bit larger, but exponentially larger.

The trouble begins in polite conversation when one postulates that the future cannot grow to infinity. That, perhaps, the economy of America—if not the world—is entering a condition of debt ...