Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who wants to be president, didn’t have to look far Oct. 29 when he wanted to praise something that isn’t broken in the United States.
Speaking at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, Carson cited the Save Our Youth program in Denver.
“Individuals become mentors for students heading in the wrong direction, bring them into their own world and teach them things that they never would have known,” Carson said. “Almost all of those kids graduate from high school, and many of them go onto college and do very useful things – where the trajectory was just the opposite direction.”

Carson, who recently surged past businessman Donald Trump to lead the Republican field, was speaking the day after the most recent Republican debate, which was in Boulder.

His praise for the Denver program for young people was effusive.

“This is what happens when people invest in people … We need to stop allowing the agents of hatred and division to prevail in our society. They try to convince people that we are all each other’s enemies and there is a war on women, race, income, age, and religion and every war you can imagine.”
In his standard stump speech remarks, he touched on familiar themes before taking questions.
“Americans are logical people with common sense, but they have come to discover that if you say certain things then you’re going to be pulverized,” Carson said. “You’re going to be called names, you’re going to get an IRS audit, somebody’s going to mess with your job and you’re going to be ostracized.”
Carson moved through some of his favorite talking points:
• Attitude: “The can-do attitude propelled the U.S. to the pinnacle of the world…. That same attitude is in the process of being replaced with the “what-can-you-do-for-me” attitude, and it is so important that we change that.”
• Income Gap: Hillary “Clinton and Bernie Sanders like to talk about this topic and will try to force you to believe it’s because of rich people and how they’re doing bad things to poor people,” he said. “Well in a sense they’re right, because they are the ones doing it.”
• Fiscal gap: “The unfunded liabilities that we owe – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all those government agencies and departments, all the money that we owe going into the future (infinite horizon) vs. what we expect to collect from taxes and other revenue sources – those numbers should pretty close together if you’re fiscally responsible,” he said. “If they’re not, there’s a gap… right now it sits at over $200 trillion.”
• Size of government: “…We have this gigantic bloated government. I would declare [a] moratorium on hiring because we have 4.1 million federal employees,” Carson said. “We do not need 4.1 million federal employees. I would just let them retire. They would retire, thousands of them every year, just without replacing them. You can shift people around.”
• Taxes: “We have the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world,” he said. “It is absurd. I would declare a tax holiday for six months so that we can re-patriate the $2.1 trillion overseas that is not being brought back because of corporate tax rate. Let that come back here, without taxes, and the only requirement would be that only 10 percent of it must be used in enterprise zones, to create jobs for unemployed and people on welfare. You want to talk about a stimulus, that would be the biggest stimulus since FDR’s Great New Deal and it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers one penny.
• His political experience: “I love it when people come up to me and say, ‘But, but, but you’ve never been elected to any public office,’” Carson said. “The ark was built by amateurs,” he added. “The Titanic was built by professionals.”
Carson took a few questions from the audience.
• Last night during the CNBC debate [in Boulder], there was a particular moderator that was quite hard on you regarding your economic and fiscal policy and all the numbers, would you mind going into a little more specifics regarding your policies? “We were talking about my taxation program and they said, ‘No way, the numbers don’t add up.’ Well they add up perfectly fine… If you tax that at a 15% rate, that yields $2.7 trillion. You’re only $800 billion away …. And we still haven’t taxed capital gains at 15 percent or corporate product at 15 percent…. And by not increasing the federal hiring and by requiring every division of the government to cut their budget by 2-3 percent…. The other thing that I would do is I would get the most powerful economic engine in the world rolling again by getting rid of useless regulations.”
• I’m a citizen who tries to live by the law conscientiously and not do anything illegal…. But it’s provoking to me when I hear on the news that states are breaking federal laws, politicians breaking federal laws, there’s illegality against immigration. Why isn’t there action against these illegalities when we the average citizen would pay tooth and nail for breaking the law? “We are a nation of laws, or at least we used to be, before we have an executive department and a judicial branch that wants to pick and choose the laws that it wants to enforce…. I believe it is possible to seal the border within one year…. And then I believe that we have to deal with the millions and millions of people already over here. If they have a pristine record, and they’d like to stay, then they’d have to register within a defined period of time. I’d like to make it six months. They’d have to pay a back-tax penalty, they’d have to pay taxes going forward, they are not citizens, and they don’t get to vote.”