On Thursday pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson gave a riveting speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in which has caused conservatives and liberals to begin to rethink our national group think. The director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said his comments were “directed at the situation that is going on in our nation and how we can solve it.”
Carson later said his speech was “not an attack on anybody, but it’s saying there are logical solutions for our problems and there are things that we can all get behind — be we right wing, be we left wing. It doesn’t matter, because we need to do the things that will benefit the entire society and get us moving in the right direction,” he told Armstrong Williams, host of the Right Side. “We need to be able to have open discussions.”
“Our deficit is a big problem,” said Carson told the attendees of the breakfast including president Obama and the First Lady. “Sixteen-and-a-half trillion dollars. You think that’s not a lot of money? Count one number per second. You know how long it would take to count to 16 trillion? 507,000 years. More than half-a-million years to get there.”
What about our taxation system? So complex, there is no one who can possibly comply with every jot and tittle of our tax system. If I wanted to get you, I can get you on a tax issue.
It doesn’t make any sense. What we need to do is come up with something that’s simple.
God has given us a system. He didn’t say, ‘If your crops fail, don’t give me a tithe.’ He didn’t say, ‘If you get a bumper crop, give me a triple-tithe.’ So, there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10, you put in $1.
But some people say, ‘That’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made $10’ — but where does it say that you have the hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him.
It’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here — building our infrastructure and creating jobs. We’re smart enough to figure out how to do that.
We need to have good health care for everybody, but we have to figure out efficient ways to do it.
When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed — pretax — from the time you’re born ’til the time you die.
When you die, you can pass it on to your family members, so that when you’re 85 years old and you’ve got six diseases, you’re not trying to spend up everything,” he added. “You’re happy to pass it on and there’s nobody talking about death panels.
For the people who are indigent who don’t have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already have this huge pot of money. Instead of sending it to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now, they have some control over their own health care.”
Carson’s admonishment to be fearless and not allow political correctness to stop us from having the tough discussions and arriving at solutions that serve our country as a whole is one we must heed.
Let the conversations begin……