The liberal Pat Lynch in his article “Worry Inc.” Arkansas Democrat- Gazette, April 4, 2011 commented:

While the budget cutters are busy going after programs that help mere citizens, any notion of bringing taxrates for the wealthy back to the levels of the Clinton era, when there was a federal surplus, is off the table.

Liberals always think they can raise the taxes on the rich and everything else will take care of itself. The problem with our deficit is not that the politicians need more money but they need to spend less. I heard Congressman Tim Griffin say that on Monday.

Brian Riedl of The Heritage Foundation discusses the newly released budget by President Bush.

Brian Riedl is the author of the article “The Three Biggest Myths About Tax Cuts and the Budget Deficit,” (Heritage Foundation, June 21, 2010), and the next few days I will be sharing portions of his article

Riedl’s budget research has been featured in front-page stories and editorials in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. He has discussed budget policy on NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. He also participates in the bipartisan “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour,” which holds town hall meetings across America focusing on the looming crisis in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

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In my last post I included this:

Myth #2: Future deficits are “the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.”

Fact: These policies play a relatively minor role in the growth of future deficits. 

During his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Obama asserted:

At the beginning of the last decade, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.[7]

In other words, according to President Obama, the massive budget deficits are President Bush’s fault, but the data do not support this assertion. President Bush implemented the three policies mentioned by President Obama in the early 2000s. Yet by 2007—the last year before the recession— the budget deficit had stabilized at $161 billion. Since the combined annual cost of these three Bush-era policies is now relatively stable, they cannot have suddenly caused a trillion-dollar leap in budget deficits beginning in 2009.[8]

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However, the larger problem is that the President’s entire methodology fails basic statistics. With Washington set to collect $33 trillion in taxes and spend $46 trillion over the next decade, how does one determine which spending programs “caused” the $13 trillion deficit? By the President’s methodology, one could blame any $13 trillion group of spending programs (or tax cuts) for the entire budget deficit. For example, the President could have blamed much of the 10-year budget deficit on Social Security (10-year cost of $9.2 trillion), antipoverty programs ($7 trillion), net interest on the debt ($6.1 trillion), or non-defense discretionary spending ($7.5 trillion).[12] (See Chart 3.) There is no legitimate, mathematical reason for President Obama to ignore all of these more expensive policies and single out the $4.7 trillion in tax cuts, the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Medicare drug entitlement. A better methodology would focus on which program costs are actually growing and pushing the deficit up.

Finally, there is some hypocrisy at work. President Obama criticizes President Bush for “not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.” Yet he would extend $4 trillion of these policies (while repealing $700 billion in tax cuts) without paying for them either. By his own faulty logic, he is almost as irresponsible as President Bush.

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This is part of the series I am doing on Famous Arkansans. This is part two on Wayne Jackson who grew up in West Memphis.

Elvis “In the Ghetto”

EIN – You had worked with so many of the great soul singers so did the booking for an Elvis session cause you any anxiety?

W.J – To be honest with American Studios and the Elvis sessions, they were just plain recording sessions. The “Gods from Heaven” did not come down & there was no fire & brimstone either. It was just a recording session that just happened to be with Elvis. There was of course a lot more magic in recording Elvis than there was in recording a nobody but American studios had some great talent going through it at the time.

The first time I actually heard Elvis sing ‘In the Ghetto’ however I was quietly sitting with my horn and looking at the music. I hadn’t heard any of it yet and I suddenly realised that this was really special stuff. I just got a chill up my spine hearing that. I knew that it was going to be a landmark record for Elvis because it was about such a current topic. I thought “My God, here we all are genuinely in the ghetto!” There really was a guy with an automatic rifle on the roof in case of something bad happened – especially after Martin Luther King died.

You see American Studios was in the worst part of town. Stax was a little nearer Graceland, but American & Hi studios, all of them were in the worst parts of town. ‘Suspicious Minds’ was also an emotional subject for Elvis at that time as well and it was a thrill to be involved in those songs, knowing that they would be so important to his future career as they were.

EIN – Interestingly Dusty Springfield’s fabulous LP ‘Dusty In Memphis’ was released on the same day January 13, 1969 that Elvis came in to American Studios to record! Featuring the same line up as Elvis’ band wasn’t ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ a stunner?

W.J – It was one of the best of the era. There was so much music and also a lot of poverty and we all worked to earn something extra and I was one of those people.

EIN – Were you brought in for sessions or did you play for whoever came along.

W.J – Chips Moman produced Stax’s big early hit ‘Last Night’ and I played on that. He liked my horn sound and so anytime they needed horns at American they’d call us up. We also worked Muscle Shoals studios too!
At the time I’d known Elvis for lots of years and recently he had been singing those poor “Movie Songs” which we were not that excited about since we’d recently been recording three number 1 records each a week! But the songwriters really had their day with him, including Mark James and ‘Suspicious Minds.’ In fact Mark James is a good friend of mine and we wrote some songs together.

EIN – How did Chips Moman’s session work out since there were a lot of overdubs. Were you there when Elvis recorded the vocals?

W.J – Next door was a restaurant & upstairs there was kid of a holding area. Because the studio was so small we would often go off with the Backing singers while the rhythm section worked out the backbone of the songs. We would be playing poker upstairs while they were cutting tracks downstairs. Then we would come down and Elvis would be singing and we’d put the horns in with the track. Elvis liked to sing with the horns and hear them together with the background vocals. So although we did overdub the horns on ‘In The Ghetto’ Elvis actually sang with us while we overdubbed those. You’ve got to understand that the studio was surprisingly small so that there was not much room for the band plus the horns & back-up voices.

EIN – Like Sun Studios?

W.J – Did you visit Sun Studios? Well it was just like that room – which still has all the magic hanging around in there. Sun Studios is probably the most important place in the world for Rock’n’roll and you can certainly feel that something very important happened in that room. I reckon you might even feel it even if you didn’t know what it was because there are such energies left over from all that creativity. But that all happened before I got into the business. I never got to play at Sun until Johnny Rivers did a session, Rufus Thomas too. We also worked with U2 when they recorded there in 1988 to produce their ‘Rattle & Hum’ album.