Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Finally, the election is over (as I write this, I don’t even know who won) and maybe now we can talk about two critically important things that for some reason during 18 months of campaigning we could not talk about.

First is the "47 percent" issue. Maybe it isn’t 47 percent but surely there is some number that essentially says our country is in trouble: either because it can’t create enough jobs with incomes high enough to pay income taxes or because it in effect creates a class society with some unhealthy number of people who don’t care about the consequences of higher taxes because they don’t pay them anyway.

I don’t know the answer to this, but there are a lot of smart people in major institutions around the country who run economic models on just about everything. Why can’t we have a legitimate discussion on this topic, and know where the danger zone really is and whether or not we are heading there?

The ...