BEN CARSON, M.D., Republican Presidential Candidate
In conversation with DAN ASHLEY, Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; News Anchor, ABC 7 Television News, San Francisco

 

DAN ASHLEY: My name is Dan Ashley, the news anchor for ABC 7 Television in San Francisco KGO-TV, member of The Commonwealth Club's Board of Governors and your moderator for today's program and proud to be so. Now, it's time to introduce our distinguished guest speaker today. It is no secret that there are at least 16 Republican candidates seeking the party's presidential nomination and that those leading the pack do not represent traditional politics in many respects.

Today we are very pleased to have with us Dr. Ben Carson who, since the first presidential debate, is now running very close in the race just behind Donald Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has surged in the polls in recent weeks. A little background: Born to a single mother in Detroit, Ben Carson was raised in poverty. He says the love of reading changed the course of his life, and in 1968 he was admitted to Yale University. He went on to receive his M.D. from The University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Carson became the Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1984 at the age of 33, making him the youngest major division director in the hospital's history. Dr. Carson's accomplishments have earned him a place in medical history. Notably, he performed the first and only successful separation of Siamese twins joined at the back of the head—that was in 1987.

Dr. Carson has written eight books, three of which were co-authored with his wife of 39 years, Candy, who is with us today. He is also the recipient of the 2006 Spingarn Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the NAACP and, in June of 2008, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the land.  Dr. Carson and his wife are co-founders of the Carson Scholars Fund, which recognizes young people of all backgrounds for exceptional academic and humanitarian accomplishments. The fund is currently operating in 50 states and the District of Columbia and has awarded more than $6.7 million to more than 6,700 scholars. In 2014 the Gallup Organization, in their annual survey, named Dr. Carson one of the 10 most admired men in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, a big welcome for Dr. Ben Carson.

Dr. Carson, the Spingarn Award, the Medal of Freedom, [and being one of the] 10 most admired men in the world, what is a nice guy like you doing in a race like this?

BEN CARSON: [Laughter] Well that's a very good question. It certainly was not one of the things on my bucket list and I was really—and my wife Candy—we were really looking forward to a nice, relaxing retirement after a very arduous career. And then in 2013, along came the National Prayer Breakfast, and that kind of changed the dynamic. After that, there were so many people clamoring for me to run for president, which I thought was kind of a ridiculous idea, but I kept running into—particularly elderly Americans who would tell me they had given up on America and they were just waiting to die. I heard that so many times; it really started to bother me. And hundreds and thousands of people clamoring and saying "You need to do this," and I started thinking, "Could I really relax?" You know, we bought a beautiful home on a golf course in Florida, I bought and organ because I always wanted to learn how to play the organ. All those books you saved up the last few years before you retire, you know, I was going to read them. And all the movies you never saw, you know, people are shocked when I tell them I never saw Rocky. [Laughter]

ASHLEY: That is shocking!

CARSON: I was gonna do all this stuff. But I think the Lord had a different plan, so we will just, you know, continue down this road. You know, I don't deny the fact that I'm a person of faith. I just said "Lord, you know, it's not something that I particularly wish to do, but if you really want me to do it, you'll have to open the doors, because all the pundits and the experts say it's impossible for someone like me to put together a national organization, to be able to raise adequate funds and do all the things that are necessary," which kind of comforted me hearing that. But you know, anyway, I said "If you really want me to do it, you'll have to open the doors. And if you open the doors, I'll walk through them. And if you close the doors, I'll gladly sit down."

ASHLEY: And watch Rocky.

CARSON: [Laughter] And watch Rocky. But fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, he keeps opening the doors. So we'll keep walking through because, you know, America is a terrific place and it's worth saving as far as I'm concerned.

ASHLEY: Well we're gonna get into all of the issues in this campaign but, I think, let's start the conversation, if we can, Dr. Carson, with a little bit about you as a person and the we'll get to you as a candidate and potential political leader born in poverty, raised by a single mother. Really, in so many respects, it's an American success story because there're so many people that come from difficult circumstances. Something that I find really interesting is that you said reading changed your life, and I want you to tell me a little bit more about how and why that happened. What did you read first that sparked that?

CARSON: Well, you know, my mother always had a dream of education. She grew up in rural Tennessee in a very dilapidated, horrendous situation. [She] shuffled from home to home, able to cobble together no more than a third grade education by the time she was 13 when she got married. [She] tried to escape that environment, moved to Detroit years later, discovered my father was a bigamist. So there she was, trying to raise us by herself, and it was very difficult. And she worked extraordinarily hard [with] two, three jobs at a time, leaving at five in the morning, getting back after midnight because she didn't want to be on welfare. And people were telling her, "You've got two boys, you know, you can be on this program or that program." But she just didn't like the idea of being dependent on anybody else. But she also very much felt that education was the key. And when I wasn't doing well and my brother wasn't doing well, you know, she prayed for wisdom and came up with this idea of turning off the TV. [Laughter]

And as far as my brother and I were concerned, it was child abuse, but to add insult to injury, then we had to read two books a piece from the  Detroit public libraries every week and submit to her, written book reports, which she couldn't read, but we didn't know that.

ASHLEY: Is that true?

CARSON: Yeah, that's absolutely true. She put little check marks and highlights, underlines and we would think she was reading them, but she wasn't. But as much as I hated that, and I did hate it—her friends used to criticize her by the way. They said "You can’t make boys stay in the house reading books. They'll grow up and they'll hate you. "And I used to overhear them and I'd say "Mother, you know, they're right,"—but it didn't matter. [Laughter] We still had to do it. But as I started reading about people, it had a real transformative effect because one of the first books I read was a book called Up from Slavery, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington. And it was illegal for slaves to read, but he taught himself to read. [He] read everything he could get his hands on, became an advisor to two presidents. And I read about all kinds of people, and I began to understand that the person, who has the most to do with what happens to you in life, is you. It's not somebody else, it's not the environment. And that was incredibly liberating to me, because I used to hate poverty. You know, some people hate rats and some people hate snakes, I hated poverty. That is until I started reading all those books, and then I didn't mind it anymore—

ASHLEY: Explain that.

CARSON: Well, because then I knew that it was only temporary. That I had the ability to change it. That I had the ability to create the lifestyle that I wanted depending on how hard I was willing to work to get it. And I was willing to work very hard to get it. Therefore, I knew it was going to be only temporary. And that, to me, is something that is so important, because I developed what's known as the "can-do" attitude, and that was the very thing that characterized the rampant rise of America from nothing to the pinnacle of the world. And right now, it's being replaced with the "what can you do for me" attitude, and we need to get rid of that and reinstill the "can-do" attitude. And it's so essential that we get that in all of our population, because we only have 330 million people and we're competing with China with over a billion people, India [with] over a billion people—we need to develop all of our people. And we need to see us a unit working together and recognizing that every one that we can create success in, is a person that we don't have to worry about, or be afraid of, or support in the penal system or the welfare system and a person who is [a] tax paying member of society and may discover a new energy source with a cure for cancer. So we can't afford to throw any of our people away.

ASHLEY: Is it fair to say that your life could have gone in a very different direction from whence you came? Was there a real risk of that at some point?

CARSON: There was a tremendous risk of that. You know, I had a horrible temper. I was one of those people who thought they had a lot of rights. If you know anybody like that, you know, those are people who are always angry because somebody is always infringing on their rights. I remember once, a fellow hit me with a pebble, it didn't hurt, but I was, in [the] sense that he would dare hit me with a pebble, and I picked up a large rock, hurled it at his face, broke his glasses [and] almost put his eye out. Another time, a fellow was trying to close my locker at school. I didn't want it closed, I struck him in the forehead with my fist, unfortunately I still had the lock in my hand, put a three inch gash in his forehead. My mother was trying to get me to wear something I didn't want to wear, I picked up a hammer, went to hit her in the head with it, fortunately, my brother caught it from behind. Other than that, I was a pretty good kid, [Laughter] but you can see how that temper can really create a problem for you. And you know, when I was 14, another youngster angered me, and I had a large camping knife and I tried to stab him in the abdomen with it.

ASHLEY: I feel I should move my chair. [Laughter] The questions are going to get tougher.

CARSON: Fortunately he had a large metal belt buckle under his clothing and the knife plate struck with such force that it broke and he fled in terror, but I was more horrified than he was. I realized that I was trying to kill somebody. I locked myself in the bathroom and started contemplating my life and realizing that I would never realize my dream of becoming a physician with a temper like that. And I just fell on my knees and I prayed and there was a Bible there and I picked it up and opened to the Book of Proverbs.

ASHLEY: Were you born again at that time or no?

CARSON: Theoretically, but not in actuality. And as I started reading from the Book of Proverbs, there were all these verses in there about fools. And it seemed like they were all written about me. And there were all these verses about anger like Proverbs 19:19, there's no point getting an angry man out of trouble, he's just going to get right back into it.

And also verses like [Proverbs] 16:32, mightier is the man who can control his temper than the man who can conquer a city. And for hours, three hours I stayed in there, reading, contemplating, praying, and I came to an understanding during those three hours that to react, to punch somebody in the face, to kick down a door was not a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness, and it meant that you could be easily manipulated by other people. And I also realized that it was a sign of selfishness to always be angry, because it's always about me, my and I: Somebody did this to me, they're in my space, you know, all this kind of stuff. And when I came out of that bathroom after three hours, I was a different person. I've never had an angry outburst since that day.

ASHLEY: Literally?

CARSON: Yeah.

ASHLEY: That may have been the most productive three hours you've ever spent in your life.

CARSON: I think it was. It's particularly useful now because you'll notice that the people in the media cannot get a rise out of me. [Laughter]

ASHLEY: Based on your past, I think that's a good thing. Why medicine? Why the fascination and when did you become interested in medicine?

CARSON: I decided when I was eight years old that I wanted to be a missionary doctor. [I] used to hear about the stories in church and Sabbath school about missionary doctors traveling all over the world, [making] great personal sacrifice, to not only bring physical but mental and spiritual healing to people, and they seem like the most noble people on the Earth. So I decided that I was going to be a missionary doctor when I was eight years old. And that was my dream until I was 13, at which time, having grown up in dire poverty, I said I'd rather be rich. [Laughter] So at that point, missionary doctor was out [Laughter]. And psychiatrist was in.

I didn't know any psychiatrists, but on TV, they seemed like rich people. You know, they drove Jaguars, they lived in these big fancy mansions, they had these plush offices, and all they had to do was talk to crazy people all day, so I said "This is great! This is what I'm going to do." But you know, I was a local shrink in high school, everybody brought me their problems, I would rub my chin, say "Tell me about your mama." Then I did psych as a psych major in college, advanced psych in medical school. But I came to the understanding that my real talent had to do with eye-hand coordination, the ability to think in three dimensions, or [being] the very careful person [that] never knocked things over and said "oops"—which are good characteristics for a brain surgeon by the way. And you know, I put all that together, that's how I came up with neurosurgery, and then with kids.

You know, with kids, what you see is what you get. You know, they don't put on a lot of airs, they don't have a lot of secondary agendas, and you could operate for 10, 15, 18 hours on a kid, and if you're successful, the reward may be 50, 60, 70 years of life. Whereas with an old geezer, you spend all that time operating and they die in five years of something else. [Laughter] I like to get a big return on my investment. And frankly, on a serious note, you know, spending my whole professional career trying to save children and to provide them with longevity and quality of life is really the main reason why I'm doing this, because I think about their future and I think about what we're doing to their future financially and in lots of other ways. And you know, maybe the traditional politicians will fix it, but I don't see any evidence in that looking over the last few decades, and therefore I just can't sit idly by and watch it happen.

ASHLEY: It's hard to characterize the main reasons, but focusing on what you believe needs to happen for the children of America, what are the top two or three issues that you want to address immediately? The most important things facing the country?

CARSON: Well, I want to get our fiscal house in order. I mean Thomas Jefferson said it's immoral to pass debt to the next generation. I mean if we could somehow transport him to our time right now, he would probably immediately stroke out if he saw what we were doing. I mean $18-plus trillion of national debt? If you'd try to pay that back at a rate of $10 million a day [for] 365 days a year, it would take you more than 5,000 years. And this is what we're passing on to our children. But that's the good news, because it's the fiscal gap that concerns me. And anybody who's not familiar with the fiscal gap, when you go home tonight, please look it up.

I mean, this is essential that we all know about this. That's the unfunded liabilities that, we all as a government—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, governmental programs—owe going forward versus what we expect to collect from taxes and other revenue sources. And those two numbers should be pretty close together if you're fiscally responsible. If you're not, a gap develops there. Bring it up into today's dollars and you got the fiscal gap, which sits at over $200 trillion. And the only reason we can sustain a debt of that level is because we can print money. We're the reserve currency of the world. If we could not print money, I mean Greece would look wonderful compared to where we would be. We have to find a way to get that under control; it must become a priority for us.

ASHLEY: We've heard for years it's unsustainable and yet it had been sustained. Is it unsustainable now?

CARSON: Well it's sustainable until the house of cards collapses, then it's not sustainable.

ASHLEY: What collapses the house of cards?

CARSON: Well, you can only tolerate so much debt. And what if we can't print money and we still have that level of debt? Now we are the reserve currency, but that's a title that generally goes with the number one economy in the world, which we have been since the 1870s until last year when China took over. Would they like to be the reserve currency? Would they like to be able to print money? Yeah! It would help them quite a bit with the situation there. But their system won't sustain it right now, fortunately for us, so we still get to be. But to me, it's just a warning. It's a blessing that we have this warning and we have this time that if we act intelligently we can fix it.

ASHLEY: Tell us about acting intelligently. What would you do to fix it?

CARSON: Well thank you for asking that question. First of all, we need to balance the budget. It's ridiculous what we're doing, and if we simply refuse to increase the federal budget by one penny for three or four years, that would balance the budget. I would do a lot more than that quite frankly. I would call in all departmental heads and say, "I want you to reduce your budget by 3 to 4 percent, and if you can't do it, turn in your resignation now, ‘cause you're gonna be fired." Anybody who tells you that there's not 3 or 4 percent of fat in all of our departments is lying through their teeth.

ASHLEY: Give us an example of the fat. Say in defense; say in health care, just—

CARSON: OK, I'll give you an example. The federal government owns 900,000 buildings. We also own 2.4 billion acres and all the mineral rights, but let's just stick with the buildings for now; 77,000 of those buildings are either not utilized or severely under-utilized, and yet, with taxpayer money, we are leasing or renting 500 million square feet of office space. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I mean there's plenty of fat that can be cut down. That's one thing.

The other thing is we have to understand that from 1850 until 2000, our average growth rate for our economy was 3.3 percent. From 2001 to 2014 there's a 1.8 percent [average growth]; that's a marked change. If you extrapolate that out over 20 years at 1.8 percent, you're talking about a $26 trillion economy. At 3.3 [percent] you're talking about a $35 trillion economy. That's a big difference when you've got all these unfunded mandates, unfunded liabilities to deal with. So you have to ask the question, "How do we get that economy rolling again?"

Well, we have the most powerful economic engine the world had ever known, but what have we done? We have put all these fetters of regulation around it, and what people don't realize is that every single federal regulation—in addition to complicating people's lives—cost money. And that money gets passed on. You know, I remember when Dodd Frank came along, and I've been in corporate America for a very long time, a lot of people don't know that.  You know, I sat on the board of Kellogg's for 18 years, Costco for 16 years; I was the chairman of the board of Vaccinogen, a biotech company in addition to starting, with my wife, a national scholarship fund. So, plenty of business experience, people think I don’t have it, and I, you know, blow 'em away in business. But anyway, what we have to recognize is, you know, during all that, we would sit around tables talking about who do we have to hire in order to deal with this regulation, and this regulation and this regulation, and we would have to hire them. Guess who would have to pay those costs? The consumer.

So that's my point, every regulation costs in terms of goods and services. Who gets disproportionately hit by that? Poor people and the middle-class. Doesn't bother the upper-class, but it hits those people disproportionately. Those are the kinds of things that are driving these income gaps that you never hear the Bernie Sanders or the Hillary Clintons talking about. So we need to get the unnecessary regulations out, not the necessary ones. You know, our founders said if men were angels, no government or regulation would be necessary. But we know men are not angels nor are women, therefore, we clearly do have to have appropriate regulations in place.

That's one thing. The other thing is: we have an unreasonable taxation system. We need a system that encourages entrepreneurial risk taking and capital investment, not one that depresses it. And just one last thing in terms of the taxes, the corporate tax. We have the highest corporate tax in the developed world, and it is driving business out of our country; that's a no-brainer. And what I would suggest that we do is have a six-month hiatus on the corporate taxes  so that we could re-patriate the over $2 trillion of American money overseas and that wouldn't cost the taxpayers one penny, and 10 percent of it, I think, should be utilized to create jobs for people on welfare and people who are unemployed.

ASHLEY: Dr. Carson, there are many peoples, and certainly Democratic presidential contenders, who believe that American corporations in many instances are not paying enough, not paying their fair share. What do you say to that?

CARSON: You might be shocked to hear that to some degree I agree, in a sense that we have all these loopholes and deductions and things that allow people to escape paying. I know a lot of people who make a lot more money than I do and pay considerably less taxes than I do because they have very slick corporate lawyers and they know how to, you know, manipulate the system. I don't manipulate the system, so I pay through the nose. And I don't like paying through the nose. I don't think anyone likes paying through the nose, but I think it should be fair across the board. And that's why I have advocated, you know, a flat tax.

The reason I'd like that ideal is because it's based on proportionality and I make no secret of the fact that God's a pretty fair person and he advocated a tiding system. He didn't say, "If your crops fail, you don't owe any tide," he didn't say, "If you have a bumper crop, you owe me triple tide," so there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one and you get the same rights and privileges and you get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes so that nobody gets any special favors. And of course you'll have your people who'll say, "But that's not fair because the guy who put in a billion dollars, he still got $9 billion left. That's not fair." Well that's called socialism, and that's not what built America. What built America was, people said "That guy just put in a billion dollars, let's make the environment even better so next year he can make $20 billion and put in $2 billion." That's what built America. It was never built on taking, and taking, and dividing and redistributing; that's not America.

ASHLEY: If we went to the flat tax, what has your analysis told you about what that would do for revenue for the country?

CARSON: Well, the key is: you have to get rid of all the deductions.

ASHLEY: You can't have a flat tax and the loopholes and deductions.

CARSON: Right. You gotta get rid of all of them. And you know, a lot of people say "I'll lose my house if I don't have a mortgage deduction." But they're not thinking, because the fact of the matter is, your tax rate is so much lower. You don't need that mortgage deduction. And a lot of people say, "Well churches will all disappear and all charitable organizations will disappear." They need to go back and read their history book, and you will see that charities thrived very well before 1913 when we enacted the Federal Income Tax, and I think if people had more money in their pocket, they'll actually be more charitable. But they'll be able to give it to the people that they want to give it to. I think it's gonna have to be somewhere between 10 and 15 [percent], probably closer to 15 [percent] in the beginning, but as we get things going, it will gradually come down.

ASHLEY: Do you really believe charities won't suffer if there are no deductions for charitable donations?

CARSON: I don't think so at all. Think about America. Think about the country that we live in, which you might be surprised to know, we were the impetus for socialism. The Europeans, they looked over here, they saw the Fords and Kellogg's and the Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers, and they said "You can't have a society like that where you have these rich people and everybody's poor. You gotta have a government that receives all the funding and then equitably redistributes it." Have you ever heard that before? [Laughter] So that's how socialism got started.

But what they didn't know is that we were different. All those names I just gave you? Instead of just hoarding money and passing it down from generation to generation, [they] built the infrastructure of our country, built the transcontinental railroad, built the ports and  the textile mills and the factories, which allowed  us to create the most dynamic middle-class the world has ever seen, which rampantly propelled us to the pinnacle of the world. As late as 2009, 40 of the wealthiest families in America agreed to give away half of their wealth to charity. Go to Africa, or Asia, or Europe or South America; ask the 40 wealthiest families to give away half their wealth, they'll look at you like you got six heads.

This is an American phenomenon: When there's a disaster in the world, who's always right out front? We are. We're generous people. And we have to take advantage of that, because I can tell you, travelling around this country, speaking at a lot of events, you know, I've seen enormous success when people invest in their fellow human beings and personal relationships are developed and people are willing to put tons of money into it and I've seen the results of that. And I have a very good inkling of what could happen in this country if the government can just act to help coordinate and facilitate the good will of the people, because I really believe it is our responsibility as the people to take care of those in our society. It is not the government’s job. [Applause]

ASHLEY: Dr. Carson, from the audience: a common GOP theme is the need to make America great again, but America is the greatest country in history. What is not great about America?

CARSON: Well, what's not great about us right now, is that we've allowed the purveyors of hatred and division to have too much sway, and hence they've convinced people that there's a war on women, that there're race wars any time there's conflict between people of two races, that there's income wars, that there're age wars, that there're religious wars, and I don't believe it for one bit. But they've had too much sway, too much influence and we the American people have got to understand that we are not each other's enemies. The enemies are those who are trying to convince us that we are each other's enemies.

[Just] because you disagree with someone on some issue, that doesn't make them your enemy. It doesn't mean that you want to destroy their lives and, you know, get rid of their employment and sue them—I mean this is crazy—

ASHLEY: Isn't the Republican Party and Republican leadership just as guilty in that regard as the Democratic Party?

CARSON: Well I gotta tell you something, I'm not a highly partisan person. I think it is a huge problem. I don't care which party you're in, and the reason that it's so important that we stop fighting each other is because we have much bigger problems, and they're not Democrat problems or Republican problems; they are American problems. And when our financial structure collapses, if we continue down this road, it's gonna affect everybody; I don't care what your party is. And if we keep fighting each other the way we are and we weaken ourselves, when the Jihadists get over here, I guarantee you they're not going to ask you if you're a Democrat or Republican before they cut your head off.

ASHLEY: Let's talk about—from the audience again—money and politics. How would you prepare to get the influence of money out of politics? It's a great bumper sticker: Is that ever really gonna happen?

CARSON: Well I'll tell you how I'm personally doing it. I'm not going around looking for billionaires and licking their boots and asking—

ASHLEY: You have a very unusual way of fundraising.

CARSON: I have no intention of ever doing that. I'm not gonna get in the bed with special interest groups. I think that's abominable. I simply said, “If the people want me to do this, then the people need to fund it.” And they have been funding it at record level and we have no problem whatsoever doing what we need to do without licking the boots and without bringing in special interest groups. And in the Carson administration, I gotta tell you, the special interest groups are gonna be out in the cold. We're just not going to deal with them. [Applause]

ASHLEY: For those who don't know, Dr. Carson by design presumably, he has fundraised in a very unique way in this campaign. Tell this audience what is different about the way you've approached it. You touched on it a little.

CARSON: Well basically, we've gone to the people. We're approaching 3 million Facebook friends and they donate. We have over 400,000 donations and the average donation is only around $50. You know, some of the letters are so poignant. People on fixed incomes, you know, they say "I can only afford to send $25 this month," but they say, "Next month, I'm going to send you $25 again. And then next month, I'm gonna send you $25 again." And I gotta tell you, I do not want to disappoint those people. I certainly don't want to waste their money.

ASHLEY: We'll move off the money equation here in a moment, but can you compete that way through the long-term? You're up against, at least in the Republican side, Donald Trump who has all the money in the world, and of course after the nomination process, things will change financially, but can you compete for the moment?

CARSON: Well, all I can tell you is, throughout my professional career I encountered people who said, “You can't do this. No one's ever done this before. That can't be done." And if I had listened to those people, I wouldn't be here talking to you today. So, you know, I'm not worried about that to be honest with you. And this is not to say that we're not talking to some big money people, 'cause we are, but we’re making it very clear to them they're welcome to donate, but they're not buying any influence. They can donate if they are on board with our attempt to save America and the way that we are planning to do it.

ASHLEY: Let's move into some of the major issues in this campaign. As a physician, you are uniquely qualified to talk about this in some respects, The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, what's wrong with it? What would you do differently?

CARSON: What's wrong with it? My God. OK.

ASHLEY: Was there a problem—let me start this way. Was there a problem before Obamacare?

CARSON: Yes. There was a problem before Obamacare, no question about it. And you know, I wasn't involved in trying to fix the system even before Obamacare, but working within the system. I don't think it's doable within the system because it was such a bad system.

ASHLEY: And very quickly because I want to walk through this with you so people really understand: What was wrong with the system in your estimation? You saw it day to day.

CARSON: Well the biggest problem with the system is that we had a major pillar of it being insurance companies that made a profit by denying people care. It was an inherent conflict of interest, plus it was a big unwieldy system that was incredibly inefficient. I shouldn't use the word "was," it still is, but the thing about Obamacare that I really dislike is not that it doesn't work, and not that it isn't affordable, what I really dislike about it is, this is a country that was supposed to be of, for and by the people with a government there to facilitate life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With Obamacare, along comes a government and [it] says "We don't care what you the people think. This is what we're doing; we're gonna shove it down your throat's and if you don't like it, too bad." Well that's a completely different paradigm than what America was supposed to be, and what I have proposed instead is a health savings account system.

Make health savings accounts available from the day you're born to the day you die, at which time you could pass it on. And I'm talking about the kind of health savings account that works like your savings account. You have control over it. There's not 600 bureaucrats on it. And you pay for it with the same dollars that we pay for traditional health care with— you would have to use as many of them, and you give people the ability to shift money and their health savings account between members of the family. So if you were $500 short, your wife could give it to you out of hers or your uncle, or your cousin, your brother, your sister; that gives you enormous flex—

ASHLEY: To cover deductibles and that sort of thing—

CARSON: Anything in the medical field.

ASHLEY: But it would be up to me to save that money in that account.

CARSON: Well the money in the account, like I said, would come from the same sources that the money comes from now, it's just that instead of it going to buy  health insurance policy, it goes into the accounts and is divvied up that way. It makes the cost of your catastrophic insurance dramatically lower because nothing's coming out of it except catastrophic health care. How often do you have that? It's like a homeowner's policy with a large deductible. It's a very different animal than a homeowner's policy where you want every scratch covered. And that's going to take care of 75 percent of the population quite easily.

It doesn't take care of the indigent. Now how do you take care of them? That's about, unfortunately, about a quarter of the population, about 80 million people, which is far too many, which we can fix if we fix the economy and we get the jobs available for people, but that's another story. Let's deal with what we have if we have 80 million people, we take care of them now with Medicaid. The Medicaid budget is $4 to $500 billion a year, that's a lot of money. If you divide 80 million into $400 billion, that's $5,000 for each man, woman and child. That's the allocation. What could you buy with that?  A concierge practice. A concierge practice is $2 to $3,000 a year on average and still have a couple thousand dollars left over to buy your catastrophic insurance, which is much cheaper now.

I'm not saying we should do that, I'm saying that's how much money there is. And look what could happen with that. If we begin to let indigent people have their own health savings account, a lot of people in Washington D.C. [will] say it won't work because they're too stupid and they can't manage something like that, but they said that about food stamps too, and they did learn how to manage it. And they learned very quickly to not go to the emergency room when they have a diabetic foot ulcer and pay five times more than it would cost to go to the clinic; they'll go to the clinic where they'll take care of it also but they'll say, "Now let's get your diabetes under control so you're not back here in three weeks with another problem." A whole other level of saving that we are not realizing right now. So that's the way you get the prices down and empower people, because now, people are starting to think about their own health care, they're taking personal responsibility. We want programs that encourage responsibility, not programs that encourage dependency.

ASHLEY: And that is the fundamental flaw in your judgement of Obamacare?

CARSON: That's one of the biggest flaws. The flaw is that the most important thing that we have, our health and our health care, is being put in the hands of the government. That's not America.

ASHLEY: Dr. Carson, while we're talking about health care and health related matters, let's talk about, this is from a member of the audience, your comments, in the past, about the Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood, walk us through. Do you regret anything you've said on that topic? Have you changed your mind at all?

CARSON: No. What I've said about her is easily findable on lots of different places. She was a eugenicist. She made her feelings known about whom she considered inferior and she thought that it would improve the society by keeping those people from reproducing and by having the ones that she considered superior to reproduce. I find her to be a despicable person.

ASHLEY: Let's talk about Planned Parenthood and the controversy over abortion. You are—you have said you are pro-life but you want decision made within 20 weeks. Is that correct?

CARSON: No.

ASHLEY: No?

CARSON: No, that is not correct at all.

ASHLEY: OK, tell me where you are. Forgive me.

CARSON: I am pro-life, you know, having spent my entire professional career trying to save lives, working all night, many a night, on a premature baby to save their life, operating on babies still in the mother's womb, I think it's pretty easy to understand why I would be pro-life, why I would not sanction killing babies at any level.

ASHLEY: And yet you have made a distinction between using material from an unborn child for research purposes versus what Planned Parenthood is talking about. Draw the distinction for people.

CARSON: The distinction is quite easy. It's sort of like if you're on an archeological dig and you find a tablet that has some writing on it but you don't recognize that writing and you turn it over to that archivist and they go through all their icons and they say "This looks like something from Mesopotamia in the 5th century," and that's how you kind of figure out what the relationship is. We do the same thing in medicine. They have tissue blocks of every aspect of humanity, from a fertilized egg to people who are 120 years old. And they go back and they look at those tissue blocks and samples to help determine. So what I did in that research, was provide a tissue, because nobody else has a way of getting in the middle of a brain and getting that. I gave them the tissue; they take the tissue, they compare it and they were able to figure out what were the origins of that tissue.

ASHLEY: From the audience: As president, what would your position be on full-service reproductive health centers including abortion?

CARSON: I do not believe in abortion on demand. I simply don't, so I wouldn't fund it. And I know there are a lot of other people who don't believe in it and they shouldn't be forced to fund something like that. You know, I'm a live and let live person in a sense that I'm not gonna put you in jail if you don't agree with me, but the interesting thing about America, if you look at the whole abortion issue, [is] you'll see how opinions have migrated significantly over the last couple of decades. Why? Because now we have ultrasounds and we have endoscopy. We have ways of seeing that baby. You could see that baby at 12 weeks. You can see the little nose and the little eyes and the little fingers and the heartbeat. It's real hard to say that that's not a human being. It's hard to say that that's a meaningless clump of cells, and as people begin to understand this more and more, they will not be very comfortable with the idea of sticking something in there and, you know, ripping its head off and pulling its arms and legs off, that's just—you know, the only way you could do that is if you could somehow in your mind, convince yourself that that's not a human being.

ASHLEY: As president, would you push hard to remove abortion rights? To change the Supreme Court ruling?

CARSON: I would certainly be looking to appoint people who respect human life, who respect the culture of life rather than the culture of death, because I believe that this is a country that was founded on morals and values, and I believe that America is different. I know there are those who want to fundamentally change us and make us like everybody else, but we're not like everybody else, we're America. There is such a thing as an American way. There's not French way; there's no Canadian way; there's no Portuguese way, there's an American way. You can be an un-American, but you can't be un-Nigerian, you can't be un-Swedish. You know, there is something that is very unique about this country, and we rose to the pinnacle faster than anybody else, and we rose to a higher pinnacle than anybody else, and it's because of the way we thought and did things, and it was because of the values that we had. And right now we find ourselves in a situation where we are busily giving away all the values and principles that made us great so we can be politically correct, and I think that's a big mistake.

ASHLEY: The qualities and characteristics of America that you just outlined in broad-brush are why so many people want to come here. Let's talk about illegal immigration. We have 13 million, roughly, people here illegally, [it's] a huge debate in this campaign, huge debate across the country, certainly here in California about what should be done. Donald Trump has said "We'll throw them all out." What say you?

CARSON: Well first of all, I say you can't even begin this debate without securing the borders. And we have the ability to do that. We have the ability to do it, we just don't have the will to do it. You know, I was down on the border with my wife a few weeks ago and I was just shocked there was nobody guarding it. The fence that was there, it was the kind of fence we used to go over with no problem when I was a kid, I mean there was nothing to it. There was one area where they had cut a big hole in it and they repaired it by putting some barb wire across there. The cameramen who were with us, they wanted to film us from the Mexican side so they just went right through that, and they were not athletic people, and they had all their equipment so I mean, it's ridiculous. It's just an open funnel, so you've got to seal that, and we can do that.

And then, what you have to do is, you have to turn off the spigot that dispenses the goodies including employment. If there's nothing to come for, then people won't come. That'll stop the influx. Now, you still have to deal with the people who are here already’ and it sounds really cruel, you know, [they say] "Let's just round them all up and send them back," people who say that have no idea what that would entail in terms of our legal system, the cost—forget about it—and plus, where are you going to send them? So that's just a double whammy.

What I have suggested is that we allow people to become guest workers assuming that they don't have any criminal record or if there's anything askew, they go. But they have a six-month window and they can get registered, they can pay a back tax penalty, they can pay their taxes going forward and they now exist above ground.

Now why is that an important thing to do? I was talking to a farmer in South Dakota recently, he has an 8,000 acre farm. He starts workers out at $11 an hour, he said he could not hire a single American, not one. And I've encountered many others who've said the same thing. That farming industry would collapse. Now there are those who say "Yeah, but we need to have high wages." They have no idea what that's going to do to their food prices, and they're being very naive when they say that. But it's also the hotel industry, there's a lot of industries, so if they're hardworking people who've been here working hard, and they want to continue working hard, and they have a clean record and they're contributing, I don't feel that it's practical to try to round them all up and throw them out. Now, it doesn't give them—

ASHLEY: Because it's expensive and impractical to do so and because of the effect it will have on removing those workers who will work at those wages

CARSON: Right, you've got to look at Factor A and Factor B and you've got to be pragmatic. You can't do everything—

ASHLEY: Does it perpetuate that group as an underclass if you keep them here working at low wages?

CARSON: I don't feel that that would be an underclass because they still, if they want to become American citizens, can apply for American citizenship, but they have to go to the back of the line and they have to go through the same process as everybody else does. They don't get special treatment just because they've been here. And I think that's fair.

ASHLEY: [If] we can keep them out, would you build a wall like some candidate, namely Donald Trump, has talked about? Or would you just add—what would it take to increase protection on the—

CARSON: Well a wall alone is not good enough. You have to have that wall monitored. There have to be people there, and when we were down in Arizona, there were people, but they were like 75 miles inland. At the wall itself, there was nobody. And I was talking to the sheriffs down there, they're so frustrated because they catch people, you know, they put them in jail and then they get these things from ICE that says "Let 'em go," and they're dealing with the same people a few weeks later. And there was one guy who said that they had deported him 20 times, he came back 20 times. And there's no consequences to them. There's no help from the federal government; the federal government is doing nothing to solve this problem, and that's why we need a different federal government.

ASHLEY: You mentioned people making $11 an hour working on farms. Where do you stand on raising the minimum wage, the federal minimum wage? What should it be? And how should it adjust?

CARSON: I think that the appropriate thing to do is to actually have a national conference on the minimum wage and let everybody put their rationale for—and let's look at it objectively, and let's decide what it should be, and it'd probably have to be changed or prorated for each state based on what the cost of living is there. But let's index it then, to something so that we never have to have this discussion again in the history of America.

ASHLEY: Race relations, making a lot of news, particularly with what has been happening with confrontations between people of color and police officers around the country. [It's] Hard to say whether they've increased or we're seeing more of those incidents. Your take, as an African-American and as a political candidate and as a physician and as an American: Where is America in terms of race. Is it as bad as we perceive it to be or not so much?

CARSON: Well as a nation, we've made enormous progress with race relationships, and a lot of people don't want to acknowledge that. But having grown up in Detroit, which was a very segregated city with a lot of racism, those who saw the depiction [of] when I was in the eighth grade [know]. I was the only black student and got the highest academic award and one of the teachers got up and chastised the white kids. "How could you let a black kid be number one?" I mean, that's the environment I grew up in. I grew up in an environment when I went to Hopkins as an intern, I'd go into wards and invariably, a nurse thought that I was an orderly, "Mr. Jones isn't ready to be taken to the OR yet." I would say, "Well, gee, I'm sorry he's not ready, I'm Dr. Carson," and they turn 18 shades of red, and I would be very nice to them, and I had a friend for life. But I realized that from their perspective, the only black man they had ever seen on the wards in the scrubs was an orderly, so why would they think something different? And what happens is, so often, we get into this mindset where we let people rev us up and create hatred over just a misunderstanding. And I think that's something that can be resolved to a large extent from good leadership.

And the other thing, you know, think about this logically: Are there rotten police that do bad things? Absolutely. Are there rotten news people who do bad things? Absolutely.

ASHLEY: No, heavens no. [Laughter]

CARSON: Rotten doctors, rotten teachers, yes, of course. Do we go out and try to kill all the other ones because of that? Of course not. That is just a silly way of doing things and we really, once again, need to sit down [with] people on both sides with their grievances  [and] with their solutions, because we are smart people and we can come up with solutions if we don't get in our respective corners and throw hand grenades at each other.

ASHLEY: And that, you know, that sounds great in theory, but in practice, how does that translate out on the street? When there's great animosity?

CARSON: In practice, how it translates onto the street is, we start taking police officers and putting them in communities. And you introduce them early and regularly so that little Johnny's first encounter with a police officer is a pleasant one; somebody playing catch with him; guy that he knows all the time. I was talking to a police officer in Baltimore recently. He says he spends a lot of time in a particular neighborhood that he patrols. He says he never has to buy lunch, he never has to buy dinner. People always say "Hey Joe, come on in."

I mean, that's how you solve that problem, it's [the] relationships. When people know each other, it's a completely different situation.

ASHLEY: How do you, from race relations to political relations—we were promised the country was assured that when President Obama ran for office eight years ago that the acrimony would diminish in Washington and that we would work together. Politicians have said this as long as I have been covering news for 30 years. What makes you believe you can change that dynamic in Washington, because people in many parts of the country have sort of checked out? They don't believe politicians anymore.

CARSON: Well I would—

ASHLEY: Why should they believe you?

CARSON: I would simply say that I hope over the course of time, people will come to understand who I am, will go back and look at my history and on the basis of that will know that, you know, I'm not just blowing smoke and that I have no great ambition, quite frankly, to do this. But I feel called [upon] to do it by a lot of my fellow Americans, and the doors are open and I will do it, and I think as a nation, we are incredibly talented people. One of the things that I've discovered through my decades of work in corporate America and establishing a scholarship program in all 50 states as well as through my medical career is that [the] level of talent that we have in this country—I've also gotten to know a lot of military people and people in the government—we have really smart people. And if we utilize them together, what we can accomplish is mind boggling. And what we've done instead is we've divided ourselves up into Democrats and Republicans and conservatives and liberals and we let that dictate who we are rather than thinking about what actually makes sense. And again, we perhaps have not had real leadership. We certainly have not had it in the recent past; not just this president, the previous president was, I think, so involved with the war and the war effort [that] he didn't want to cross anybody because he needed everybody to agree to fund what he was doing. And quite frankly, the administration before that—you know, it goes back a while. [Laughter]

ASHLEY: This is not new.

CARSON: It goes back a while. It's not new.

ASHLEY: Well let's quickly, before we run out of time, jump overseas and talk about foreign policy. Was the deal with Iran's nuclear program a mistake? And if so, what would you do differently?

CARSON: Yeah, it was a big mistake. And first of all, I don't agree that it was a deal, because I think it should have been a treaty. And I think our Congress should have insisted that it was a treaty. There were multiple nations involved; it met all the criteria for a treaty. And if it was a treaty, then it would have to be approved by two thirds of the Senate, which it never would have gotten. So that's what they should have insisted. But at any rate, it's an executive deal, which means it has no standing with the next administration. None. Zero.

ASHLEY: And if you're the next administration, what does that mean?

CARSON: It means it will have no standing. [Laughter]

ASHLEY: And you'd go back to square one and redo that agreement.

CARSON: I would go back to square one, and I would know how to negotiate. You know, you can't have a negotiation that doesn't involve accountability and verification and enforcement. That's negotiation 101; we don't have that. Maybe I could get Donald Trump to help with the negotiation. [Laughter]

ASHLEY: He's done that in various walks of life. What do you perceive to be the major issues? We've talked about Iran, the major issues facing us overseas: China, ISIS, [the] global fight against terrorism—

CARSON: There are so many, but—

ASHLEY: Prioritize—

CARSON: You know, in terms of what can result in our destruction fairly quickly, I think [it's] global Jihadism. You know, a lot of people say, "Let's not get too involved over there, because in 2003, you know, we went and we invaded Iraq. It cost us a lot of money. It cost us a lot of lives. What did we get for it? We can't do that again." I do understand that, OK? But that's not really analyzing the problem because this is a completely different situation. We now have global Jihadists who are an existential threat to us. They want to destroy us and our way of life, and if we don't understand that, we are playing directly into their hands. And we have two choices: We can sit around and act like they're not that important, they're the JV’ [and] we can drop a few bombs in the desert [to] say we're doing something, or, we can use every resource available to us, you know, financial resources, military resources, overt and covert resources to destroy them first.

ASHLEY: Full scale war against them is what you're describing.

CARSON: I'm saying we need to do what we need to do in order to prevent them from destroying us. Their goal is to destroy us, and we have to be mature enough to recognize that we can't just sit there and let them do it.

ASHLEY: What would you—where would you fault this administration in terms of how they have handled that threat as an example of what we should do going forward? Have they failed?

CARSON: I think they've sort of handled that threat the same way they handled the threat of illegal immigration. They don't do anything. They just let it happen. And they're not really doing much to thwart the goals of the Jihadists who have established their caliphate. You know, they've got half of Iraq [and] a third of Syria. They have a foothold in Tunisia and Nigeria. I mean, they're expanding; they're looking like winners and that's why they're being successful in their recruitment efforts. Therefore, we need to be thinking about what can we do to take them out of the winner's circle.

ASHLEY: Very quickly before we run out of time: China and the huge balance and trade with China. How would you deal with that?

CARSON: Well first of all, you need to recognize that the Chinese have been around for a long time. They're very pragmatic people. Honestly, when you look back historically, they're pretty reasonable people, but they also recognize weakness when they see it. And when they see it, they take advantage of it. That's why [there's] the adventurism in the South China Sea; that's why they feel that they can attack us in cyberspace; that's why they feel that they can manipulate their currency and not pay any consequences for it. I think when they encounter a strong counterforce, you're not gonna see them doing all those kinds of things.

ASHLEY: Last couple of questions, Dr. Carson: Your background as we've described how you grew up and the challenges you've faced, what made you—and I don't want to stereotype any group here—but what made you decide to become a Republican? Because that sometimes—that background tends to tilt someone toward the other party. What made you a Republican?

CARSON: Good question. Growing up in Detroit, you know, going to Yale, a bastion of liberalism, coming back to Ann Arbor, a bastion of liberalism, going to Baltimore, a bastion of liberalism, I was a liberal. I was a Democrat; I was a radical Democrat. I bought [into] all the stuff that Democrats buy including [the idea] that Republicans are horrible racist people. But as a young attending seeing so many people coming in, able bodied people dependent on social system, I said, "There's something wrong with this." And then I started listening to Ronald Reagan. I said, "Boy, he sounds reasonable. He doesn't sound like a racist," and I just really started thinking for myself and that's really how I made the transition. And you know, I was an independent for a long time, but when I decided that I was going to run, I had to evaluate which party I would run in. I don't think I would have been accepted in the Democrat party. And also, I'm a person of deep faith, so it became [a] pretty easy thing for me to decide. I'm also a person who believes in hard work and self-reliance and compassion for others, and when I define compassion, I mean providing people with a mechanism for developing their God given talents so they can move up as opposed to patting them on the head and keeping them in a subservient position.

ASHLEY: Last question so we can make a little news here today. On track to win the nomination, will you name Donald Trump as your vice president?

CARSON: [Laughter] All things are possible.

ASHLEY: Will you serve as his vice president?

CARSON: All things are possible.