The Editor, Sir:

This is in response to Dr Orville Taylor's column in The Sunday Gleaner of May 18.

Dr Taylor:

You do yourself an injustice when you sneer at the present minister of finance as a failed businessman. President Harry Truman was a failed haberdasher, but made a good president; Sam Walton, was a failed shopkeeper, who today has developed the biggest chain of businesses in the world.

Cheap shot

Jamaica's debt today is $1 trillion, one and a half times our gross domestic product, our budget $450 billion of which only $1.5 billion can be used to service the country; this state of affairs under the watch of a Phd in, I believe, economics from the University of the West Indies.

Your sneer, therefore, is a cheap shot at a decent man. You owe him and yourself an apology for being less than fair to both, and you, a teacher at UWI. It's not the degree that makes the man, it's the man that makes the degree.

I am, etc.,

ADEEB MAHFOOD

tetjam@jamweb.net