Carson: ‘Progressive Policies’ Have Hurt the Middle Class and the Poor

HANNITY: “By the way, I've already interviewed about the comments you made. I don't want to go down and ask you the same questions every time you're on the program. Is it about –“
CARSON: “But I know the answers now.”
HANNITY: “You what?”
CARSON: “I know the answers now.” (Laughter)
HANNITY: “Well, you gave me the answer already. So I mean, otherwise, we're just rehashing the last interview. Is it about political correctness? People want -- is it that the country is -- I look at the numbers, 95 million Americans out of the labor force, 50 million in poverty, 46 million on food stamps, doubling of the debt, $5,000 median income decrease since Obama's been president. Americans are suffering!”
CARSON: “They are, without question. And who's paying attention to them? Now, the progressives would have you believe that they're the ones who are looking out for them, but it's their progressive policies that have put the middle class and the poor in this condition because the poor and the middle class no longer have a mechanism for increasing their money.”
HANNITY: “You said -- when you said that there would be -- people would be manipulated, you're talking about some demographics in the Democratic Party. You mean the people that are told that Republicans want to put you all back in chains. They don't even want to count you in the Census. They want dirty air and water. And they want to throw your grandmother over the cliff, that we hear every election cycle. Is that the manipulation?”
CARSON: “And instead saying, But we will take care of you. We will give you housing subsidies and we will give you food stamps. You know, we have 10 times more people on food stamps than we did when the War on Poverty was started.”
HANNITY: “Amazing, right?”
CARSON: “Yes. And all of these kinds of things that actually aren't elevating people.”
HANNITY: “Then let me ask you, how would Ben Carson as president get those people back in the labor force, get them off of food stamps, get them out of poverty, get family median income up? How do you do it?”
CARSON: “Well, first of all, big jump start. There's over $2 trillion overseas in American money that's not being brought back because we have the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world -- six-month hiatus, allow that money to be repatriated without taxation. The only stipulation –“
HANNITY: “No taxes, like Donald Trump wants 10 percent, which was -- would be –“
CARSON: “Right. The only stipulation would be that 10 percent of it would have to be used for empowerment zones, enterprise zones in some of our cities or to create jobs for people who are unemployment and on welfare. And that gets business and industry back in the idea of what they used to do.”
HANNITY: “Would you lower the corporate tax rate, as part of that?”
CARSON: “Oh, yes. You would lower that to below the average so we begin to –“
HANNITY: “So we become the tax haven.”
CARSON: “-- suck up -- we suck –“
HANNITY: “We begin the tax haven.”
CARSON: “Absolutely. We become a place where people are advantaged by working here.”
HANNITY: “Yes. Do you think we're better off lowering taxes overall? I mean, I will tell you that I pay on average 60 cents on every dollar I make.”
CARSON: “Which is absolutely absurd.”
HANNITY: “It's highway robbery. And then when I die, they're going to take the gold out of my teeth and half of what I saved.”
CARSON: “Right. Well, you know, first of all, we do not need that. Nancy Pelosi said if you cut the budget by one penny, it will be a disaster. Not true at all. We have 4.1 million federal employees. We have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies. We have unfunded liabilities that's incredible. Our fiscal gap is $200 trillion-plus. And unless we begin to deal with that, we have completely destroyed the future of those coming behind us. And we can deal with it quite easily.”
HANNITY: “How do you take your experience of being one of the most gifted, by all accounts -- and I even have a friend of mine once that you interviewed him and he's a brain surgeon and a neurosurgeon. And how do you take that experience and transfer that to the most difficult job in the world?”
CARSON: “Well, for one thing, you recognize that there's no one person who knows everything. Solomon himself, the wisest man who ever lived, said –“
HANNITY: “I thought he built the temple himself, right?”
CARSON: “In the multitude of counselors (ph) is safety. So I do recognize that. But I also have a history of solving complex problems. And these are complex problems. I've thought about them. I've talked to a lot of people who also know a lot about it. I have no doubt that if we utilize the incredible intellect that we have available to us in this country and we begin to focus on how we do things, rather than why we can't do them, we'll get them done. This is America.”