Public-debt debate is coming

If you think the health-care reform debate has been turbulent, just wait for the deep-recession public-debt debate. Someone has to do it. Count me in.

There must be enormous sacrifice, burden and pain. That is the price that must be paid if our democracy is to survive. As Benjamin Franklin responded in 1787 to the question of what the Constitutional Convention had produced: "A republic, if you can keep it."

BILL D. BURLISON, Advance, Mo.