Ask Ben: Jobs

Timothy Hodge, Woodbridge, VA asks:

What is your plan to revive the American industrial base? We are not creating capital at the level to sustain the populace and have been bleeding wealth for years. This has caused symptomatic issues in our country like what we have seen in Baltimore and even from my small area that I was born and raised – Martinsville, Virginia. It is a complete travesty of what has been perpetrated on the American people. There is too much of a cozy relationship between government and business.

Dr. Ben Carson:

Well, you know, for one thing, our corporate taxes are way too high. They’re the highest in the developed world and it shouldn’t surprise anybody that many of our businesses seek to do things in other countries because, you know, they don’t go into business to support the government; they go into business to make money. So, we have to create a much friendlier environment here for business and industry and, you know, I would provide a tax holiday for six months so that the two-plus trillion dollars of overseas cash could be repatriated. I would require that 10% of it be used to create jobs for people who are unemployed or on welfare to really jumpstart things in a hurry. That’s the kind of thing that will really make a big difference, particularly in our inner cities.

And, you know, we need to reform the tax code, we need to reform the regulatory codes, so that we create an environment that encourages entrepreneurial risk-taking and capital investment. Those are the kinds of things that really will get that economic engine working once again and when that begins to work, a lot of jobs are created.

We also have to get rid of things like the employer mandate in Obamacare. It used to be, you know, when somebody started a new business, they were so proud, they’d call their mom, they said, “Mom, I started a new business. I got 20 employees,” and the next year they had 30 and then 40. Now, uh-oh, better stop, because if we hit 50 then the employer mandate kicks in; all of our profits are gone. That’s the very backbone of America, small businesses; we cannot be interfering with it with these kinds of asinine regulations.

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