Political positions of Ben Carson

Carson at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in May 2015

Ben Carson is a Republican politician in the United States. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 presidential election.

Abortion and human fetal tissue

Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press in 2015, Carson said that he believed that abortion should be outlawed in all circumstances, including in cases of rape and incest. Carson said that he would consider allowing abortion for the health and safety of the mother. In the same interview, Carson compared abortion to slavery, stating that he would "love" to see the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) be overturned.

After controversial undercover Planned Parenthood videos were released in 2015, Carson condemned Planned Parenthood, saying on Fox News that there is "nothing that can't be done without fetal tissue" and that fetuses at 17 weeks were clearly human beings. Subsequently, a blogger highlighted a 1992 paper by Carson, reporting research that he and others had done using "human choroid plexus ependyma and nasal mucosa from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation." Carson subsequently defended the use of fetal tissue for medical research, telling the Washington Post: "If you're killing babies and taking the tissue, that's a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it."

Climate change

Carson rejects the scientific consensus that human activity causes climate change, expressing this belief at a Commonwealth Club forum in San Francisco in 2015. After this statement, Governor Jerry Brown of California sent Carson a flash drive containing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Synthesis Report, which details the scientific evidence of human impact on climate change. Asked about the letter, Carson told the San Francisco Chronicle that "There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused."

In November 2014, Carson said that "there's always going to be either cooling or warming going on" and that he found the debate on climate change to be "irrelevant" and a distraction from protecting the environment.

Economic issues

Taxation, budget, and Social Security

Carson has released a tax plan including a 14.9% flat tax. The rate would apply to both personal and business income. It would only apply to income above 150 percent of the federal poverty level, though citizens whose income is at or below that level would be required to make an annual de minimis tax payment. The plan would eliminate taxation of capital gains, dividends and interest at the individual level while also eliminating the alternative minimum tax and the estate tax. The plan would do away with deductions and other tax breaks. Steve Forbes has voiced support for the plan, saying that, "The one that is the cleanest one so far has come from Dr. Ben Carson, who introduced a clean flat tax about two or three weeks ago."

Previously, he had been a consistent advocate for a flat tax rate, and in the first Republican primary debate in September 2015, Carson suggested that rate should be around 10%. He claimed inspiration for the rate from the traditional tithe saying because "I think God is a pretty fair guy." In the first debate, Carson had also called progressive taxation "socialism." In an October 2015 interview on CNBC, Carson said: "I use 10 percent because it's easy to do the numbers." In the same interview, Carson said that under his plan, "You have to remove all the loopholes, all the deductions."

According to calculations by Citizens for Tax Justice, Carson's old 10-percent flat tax proposal would "raise only 32 percent of the revenue of the current tax system and pay for only 28 percent of estimated government spending" and "would increase the deficit by $3 trillion in just one year," even with every deduction eliminated.

Carson has advocated for a national luxury tax on "very expensive items."

Carson blames Washington politicians for the national debt and supports a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution, but has not explained how he would cut spending or raise revenue to achieve a balanced budget. In May 2015, Carson said that "I don't think we should even talk about entitlements until we fix the economy, and I think fixing the economy is not going to be difficult." Former head of the Congressional Budget Office Douglas Holtz-Eakin criticized this statement as naive, because the U.S. debt is primarily "attributable to significant growth" in entitlement spending (i.e., Social Security and Medicare).

Carson supports raising the minimum age to receive Social Security benefits, "because people are living longer, straining the solvency of the program."

While most of Carson's economic-policy beliefs reflect "current Republican orthodoxy," he diverges from other Republican presidential candidates in his support for reinstating Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks and was repealed in 1999. Carson believes that the repeal of Glass-Steagall helped foster growth in banks that made them too big to fail.

Minimum wage

During the 2015 presidential campaign, Carson has said that the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 should "possibly" or "probably" be higher. Carson is one of only two candidates in the Republican field to express some support for minimum-wage increase (the other is Rick Santorum).

Carson supports a two-tiered minimum wage system, with a lower "starter" minimum wage for young workers and a higher "sustainer" minimum wage for older workers. Unlike fellow Republicans, Carson also supports indexing the minimum wage to inflation, "so that we never have to have this conversation again in the history of America."

International trade

In June 2015, Carson said that "free trade is a wonderful thing" but voiced objections to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, saying that "I think we need to have much more input."

In October 2015, Carson said "I certainly believe in free trade" and that "there are aspects [of TPP] that are reasonable" but said that he wanted to see the TPP renegotiated, "because right now we have a lot of special interest groups who benefit."

Federal workforce

In October 2015, Carson called the size of the federal workforce "absurd" and called for reducing it by attrition.

In June 2015, Carson told a crowd of Republicans in Iowa that he was "thinking very seriously" about adding "a covert division of people who look like the people in this room, who monitor what government people do."

Education

In an October 2015 interview with Glenn Beck, Carson stated: "I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do. It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding on that basis." This controversial suggestion was criticized by various commentators; Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic called it "constitutionally suspect, hypocritical, poorly conceived, and laughably naive."

On the AP U.S. History curriculum, Carson said: "I think most people, when they finish that course, they’d be ready to go sign up for ISIS." Carson complained that the curriculum overemphasizes slavery, Japanese internment, and atrocities against American Indians.

In February 2015, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Carson said: "I've found that homeschoolers do the best, private schoolers next best, charter schoolers next best, and public schoolers worst. So that's why we need school choice."

Ben Carson does not support the Common Core State Standards, and wants to get rid of them. He has said this about Common Core: “In recent years, there has been a troubling trend of the U.S. Department of Education increasingly trying to dictate how children are educated in our primary and secondary schools. This must stop and Common Core must be overturned.”

Foreign policy

Syria

Carson has expressed a number of often contradictory positions on the role of the United States in the Syrian Civil War.

Carson initially opposed the Obama administration's proposed military intervention in Syria in September 2013, claiming that the rebels it would be in support of posed a national security threat to the United States and Israel, and disputing the allegation that the Syrian government was responsible for the use of chemical weapons.

By September 2015, Carson had changed his position on the Assad regime, calling for forcing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant out of Iraq in order to allow the group to focus on overthrowing the Assad regime, whilst continuing to advocate non-intervention in Syria.

Carson then staked out a more aggressive position in October 2015, advocating for the imposition of a no-fly zone along Syria's northern border with Turkey and continued military and intelligence support for anti-Assad rebels as a means of countering Russian influence in the region.

In November 2015, Carson once again opposed U.S. assistance to Syrian rebels, instead supporting a political solution in Syria, culminating in a coalition government that would include Assad. He justified his new position by criticizing the United States' support for rebels in the first Libyan Civil War.

Gun control

Carson stated in a 2013 interview with Glenn Beck that semi-automatic firearms should be better regulated in large cities and high-crime areas. This statement attracted criticism from conservative opponents of gun control. Later, Carson said: "This isn’t any evolution of my views, just that I’ve learned how to express myself," he stated that he is strongly in favor of the Second Amendment and that while guns being used on innocent people "is horrible," it "is not nearly as horrible as having a population that is defenseless against a group of tyrants who have arms. And that is what we have to bear in mind." He also said that if he were in a position of national authority, he would allow citizens to own any weapons, including automatic and semi-automatic guns, that they could buy, and that he would not support any efforts to restrict the Second Amendment.

Carson has said that "the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed." Carson's support for this "Nazi gun control theory" has been criticized by the Holocaust historian Alan E. Steinweis as "strangely ahistorical" because "no serious work of scholarship on the Nazi dictatorship or on the causes of the Holocaust" feature "Nazi gun control measures...as a significant factor."

Healthcare

Health insurance companies

In a 2009 interview, Carson said that he found the "concept of for-profits for the insurance companies" absurd. He continued, "The first thing we need to do is get rid of for-profit insurance companies. We have a lack of policies and we need to make the government responsible for catastrophic health care. We have to make the insurance companies responsible only for routine health care."

Repeal of the Affordable Care Act

On October 11, 2013, Carson spoke at the conservative Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., where he called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," further adding that it is a form of slavery because it "[makes] all of us subservient to the government." He repeated a debunked claim by stating that the ideology behind the ACA originated with Vladimir Lenin, and quoted Lenin as saying that "socialized medicine is the keystone to the establishment of a socialist state". (There is no evidence that Lenin actually said this, but the purported quote appears on a number of conservative websites.) Carson had previously expanded on the bogus quote on the October 9, 2013 edition of Fox's The Kelly File, where he said: "In other words, you've got to get the socialized medicine as the foundation, because it gives you control of the people. Once you get control of the people, you can do what you want."

After an onslaught of criticism, Carson denied that he was "equating Obamacare with slavery" in an October 15 Washington Times column and denounced the "PC police" for attempting "to discredit and... silence" him. During the National Prayer Breakfast, Carson said about the ACA: "Here's my solution. When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings account."

In a December 2014 op-ed, Carson wrote: "we need to remove health care from the political arena and recognize that any government proposals affecting the health of all citizens should be free market-based and should be so appealing that it would not be necessary to force citizens into the program."

Replacement of Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA

Carson supports abolishing Medicare, a third-rail issue in American politics. Carson also supports abolishing Medicaid.

Carson supports moving dollars out of these "traditional health care" programs into an expanded system of individual tax-exempt health savings accounts. Under a proposal outlined by Carson in 2014, the government would contribute $2,000 to each individual's account annually, individuals and employers would be permitted to contribute additional funds to the accounts, and unspent funds could be shared within a family. Carson has said that his plan "makes every family their own insurance company." Carson estimated that his plan would cost the federal government $630 billion annually; this figure, however, does not account for population growth, inflation, or administrative costs.

Separately from his individual-account proposal, in a 2014 op-ed he called for a system "similar to Medicare and Medicaid" for a group that Carson terms the "5 percent of patients with complex pre-existing or acquired maladies." The cost of this system is not factored into Carson's $630 billion figure.

But in October 2015, Carson said that if someone preferred the current Medicare or Medicaid programs to the health-savings-account approach, “I’m not going to deny you the privilege of doing that.” A campaign spokesman declined to provide details about Carson’s proposals and said the campaign had not yet released a formal plan.

End-of-life care

In 1992, Carson wrote that aging and technological advancement will eventually lead to many people surviving their 100th birthdays. He questioned the merits of prolonging life, citing the fact that "up to half of the medical expenses incurred in the average American's life are incurred during the last six months of life". He discussed the "dignity of dying in comfort, at home, with an attendant if necessary". Carson also said: "Decisions on who should be treated and who should not be treated would clearly require some national guidelines... If a patient insisted on having everything done, consideration of more aggressive treatment should be given." In January 2015, Carson stated that his views have evolved since 1992.

Immigration

In the Washington Times, Carson wrote: "Once illegals have legal status, it will be difficult to deny them any of the multitudinous entitlements that are freely distributed throughout our society." Nevertheless, Carson believes that illegal immigrants should be able to register as guest workers and have a pathway to apply for permanent resident status.

Marijuana and drug policy

Carson has said that "I think medical use of marijuana in compassionate cases certainly has been proven to be useful," but opposes legalization of recreational marijuana. Carson believes that marijuana is a "gateway drug." On the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado, Carson said "I don't think this is something that we really want for our society. You know, we’re gradually just removing all the barriers to hedonistic activity and you know, it’s just, we’re changing so rapidly to a different type of society and nobody is getting a chance to discuss it because, you know, it’s taboo.

In an October 2015 interview with Glenn Beck, Carson said that he would "intensify" the War on Drugs.

Marriage and homosexuality

In March 2013, Carson described his views about same-sex marriage on Hannity, saying: "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are. They don't get to change the definition." Carson's comparison of gay marriage to pedophiles and practitioners of bestiality caused a controversy.

Johns Hopkins University students and staff expressed objections to Carson's remarks, calling upon Carson to be replaced as the university's commencement speaker. Carson withdrew as commencement speaker and apologized, saying that "the examples were not the best choice of words" and adding that the Bible "says we have an obligation to love our fellow man as ourselves, and I love everybody the same—all homosexuals." He said on CNN that he loved all people, whether gay or straight. Carson added, "I was trying to say that as far as marriage was concerned, it has traditionally been between a man and a woman and no one should be able to change that."

In October 2014, Carson was added to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)'s extremist watch list because of his association with groups considered by the SPLC to be extremist in nature, "linking gays with pedophiles", and his comparison of health care and liberal government to slavery and totalitarianism. In February 2015, the SPLC removed his name and apologized to Carson, stating:

"In October 2014, we posted an 'Extremist File' of Dr. Ben Carson. This week, as we've come under intense criticism for doing so, we've reviewed our profile and have concluded that it did not meet our standards, so we have taken it down and apologize to Dr. Carson for having posted it. We've also come to the conclusion that the question of whether a better-researched profile of Dr. Carson should or should not be included in our 'Extremist Files' is taking attention from the fact that Dr. Carson has, in fact, made a number of statements that express views that we believe most people would conclude are extreme."

In a March 2015 interview with Chris Cuomo, Carson stated that homosexuality was "absolutely" a choice, claiming that "a lot of people go into prison straight, and when they come out, they're gay". In a Facebook post, Carson apologized, saying that he "[does] not pretend to know how every individual came to their sexual orientation." In a Facebook post, Carson said that he supports civil unions for gay couples and that he has "for many years". Carson, while on the board for Costco and food manufacturer Kellogg's supported initiatives for employment non-discrimination, health insurance for domestic partners and diversity training.

National Prayer Breakfast speech on social and fiscal issues

Carson was the keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 7, 2013. In his speech, he commented on political correctness ("dangerous", because it goes against freedom of expression), education, health care, and taxation. Regarding education, he spoke favorably about graduation rates in 1831, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, and when "anybody finishing the second grade was completely literate". He espoused the idea of a tax-exempt health savings account created at birth, that can be bequeathed at death, along with an electronic medical record and birth certificate. He supports a flat tax, which he calls the "proportional tax" in reference to the biblical tithe.

At the White House in 2008 for an award.

The speech garnered Carson considerable attention because the event is normally apolitical in nature, and the speech was critical of the philosophy and policies of President Barack Obama, who was sitting 10 feet away. Conservative commentators from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity and Neil Cavuto of Fox News praised the speech as an example of speaking "truth to power". The Wall Street Journal titled one of its op-eds "Ben Carson for President". Columnist Star Parker wrote that he "owes no apology for honest talk". Fox contributor Cal Thomas and commentator Bob Beckel, however, found his comments inappropriate.

In an interview with Neil Cavuto, Carson defended himself, "Somebody has to be courageous enough to stand up to the bullies". On February 8, he appeared on Hannity, and said that he would run for president "If the Lord grabbed me by the collar and made me do it".

After the speech, Carson said: "I don't think it was particularly political...You know, I'm a physician". Regarding the policies of President Obama, he said: "There are a number of policies that I don't believe lead to the growth of our nation and don't lead to the elevation of our nation. I don't want to sit here and say all of his policies are bad. What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation".

In the National Review, Jonah Goldberg compared Carson to Booker T. Washington, while David Graham compared him to Herman Cain without the "personal skeletons" in The Atlantic.

Carson's sudden popularity among conservatives led to him being invited as a featured speaker at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He tied for seventh place in the Washington Times/CPAC 2013 Straw Poll with 4% of the 3,000 ballots cast. In the 2014 CPAC straw poll, he came in third place with 9% of the vote, behind senators Ted Cruz of Texas (with 11%) and Rand Paul of Kentucky (31%).

Carson had a strong showing in the polls at the 2013 and 2014 Values Voter Summits: in 2013, he tied with former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum for second place with 13%, behind Ted Cruz's 42%. In 2014, he took 20% of the Values Voter Summit vote to Cruz's 25% and came in first place for the vice presidential poll.

Religion and government

See also: Seventh-day Adventist theology

Ben Carson endorses Seventh-day Adventist theology, which includes belief in a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis. In a 2013 interview with Adventist News Network, Carson said "You know, I’m proud of the fact that I believe what God has said, and I’ve said many times that I’ll defend it before anyone. If they want to criticize the fact that I believe in a literal, six-day creation, let’s have at it because I will poke all kinds of holes in what they believe." Carson's Adventism has been raised as an issue by his primary rival Donald Trump.

Carson has endorsed Ellen G. White's teaching on a core Adventist eschatological doctrine that, immediately before the Second coming of Christ, a national Sunday law will be used to persecute Adventists and other Sabbath keepers. In a 2014 address to an Australian Seventh Day Adventist church, he said that this persecution will be led by the right rather than the left.

Some Adventists have argued that his stated beliefs on gun rights and self-defense, while being the accepted orthodoxy within the Republican Party, are a departure from historic Adventist teachings on nonviolence and pacifism.

Separation of church and state

In a 2014 op-ed article, Carson argued that separation of church and state in the First Amendment Establishment Clause has been "reinterpreted" by progressives away from its original intent, and that "our Judeo-Christian values have taken a big hit in recent years, we have not yet reached the point of a totally godless government".

During a 2015 Meet the Press interview Chuck Todd asked Carson "Should a President's faith matter [to voters]?". Carson stated, "I guess it depends on what that faith is. If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter. But if it fits within the realm of America and consistent with the Constitution, no problem." When asked by Todd whether he believes Islam is consistent with the Constitution, Carson said: "No, I don't – I do not." He further stated, "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that." He stated that a Muslim running for Congress would be "a different story," depending on their policies. In a later interview on This Week, Carson said that Sharia is "against the rights of women, against the rights of gays, subjugates other religions" and is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.

A number of columnists have argued that Carson's criticism of a presidential candidate with conservative Islamic beliefs validates media criticism of his own faith.

Regarding religious liberty, Carson has said: "Everybody’s free to do whatever they want. To try to impose one’s religious beliefs on someone else is absolutely what we should not be doing. That goes in both directions. Someone who is an atheist doesn’t have a right to tell someone who isn’t an atheist what they can or cannot do or what they can or cannot say. We have to be fair but it has to be fair in both directions."

Adventists in general are strongly supportive of the separation of church and state, unlike many Republican evangelicals, and Carson has been accused of straying from this Adventist teaching in order to appeal to the Republican base.