Dear Mr. O’Connor and Mr. McKinnon,
I read with interest many of the reviews of Jeb Bush’s tax plan. As a CPA for the past 40 years, I find his plan overall to be a good start.
However, in your article in the Wall Street Journal, you included a quote from Ms. Holly Shulman of the Democrat National Committee, who declared, “What’s Jeb’s plan? More massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, all while exploding the deficit or shifting the burden onto the middle class.” As we both know, her claim is utterly outrageous.
Why, then, would you just accept a sound-byte quote without even asking if it is the result of an actual reading and analysis of his tax plan? It’s merely just a knee jerk reaction that she thought a gullible writer might just print. It represents the quintessential example of a pundit talking point. Perhaps the better article would have been that a Democrat spokeswoman made the aforementioned claim, but it was obvious that she never even looked at Jeb’s plan; her comments are simply untrue.
In fact, you yourself contradicted her attacks later in your article when you showed that “the most provocative component of Mr. Bush’s plan is his proposal to scrap many tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy”, which included the elimination of “convoluted, lobbyist-created loopholes”, and capping deductions “used by the wealthy and Washington special interests.”
As journalists who are knowledgeable about economics, if you knew the DNC commentary was detached from any economic reality and basic facts, why would you include it in your article?
Yours very truly.
Dear Mr. O’Connor and Mr. McKinnon,
In answer to the question that you posed in your ending blog “why would the WSJ writers include this in their article”, my answer is that I have noticed a much more liberal bent by the WSJ. In analyzing the various GOP presidential candidates they have heavily criticized those candidates that weren’t part of the GOP elite establishment namely the outsiders headed by Trump. So what was once a conservative right leaning newspaper these days has become at best a moderate and sometimes a left of center publication.
I think there are some parts that are more conservative and others that are more liberal in the publication. I have always enjoyed the WSJ, but it’s best to always keep a critical eye of course.