Look Who it Was Random video

Dr. Ben Carson Addresses Questions from AARP Concerning Social Security

1,239 views · Published 20 August 2015 · 2:37 · Indexed 4 November 2026

Channel: RFD-TV · 2015 · Entertainment

Watch on YouTube

Q: Tony Vola - AARP Volunteer
We know that rural America is more dependent on income from social security than our nation’s cities. What is your plan to address social security’s financial shortfall and what place does it occupy on your personal to-do list, when you are president?

A: Dr. Carson. “Actually, it is an incredibly important place because there is something known as the ‘Fiscal Gap.’ You don’t hear politicians talking about it, but I’m not a politician so I’ll talk about it. It is the unfunded liabilities, so social security, Medicaid, Medicare, all the departmental programs, cabinet programs and the money that we owe going forward versus what we expect to collect in revenues in taxes and other revenue resources. Those number should be identical and when they’re not and you bring that forward to today’s dollars, that’s what the Fiscal Gap is. And right now it sits at about $200 trillion dollars. That is unsustainable, except for the fact that we can print money as the reserve currency of the world. That may not always be. That’s a position that goes with the number one economy of the world, traditionally, which we have been since the 1870’s until last year when China became the number one economy. Would they like to be the reserve currency, so that they could print money? Absolutely.  It would help solve a lot of their problems, or at least they would think they were solving them; they’re not really solving them just like we’re not really solving them. But when we lose that ability, we are in big trouble. One of the things we are going to have to do is change our GDP to debt-ratio and we need to change the long-term outlay of money that we need. For social security specifically, what I have proposed is that we give people the ability to opt-out of receiving social security in lieu of a tax credit in the same amount as the payment they would have gotten. That immediately takes the pressure off of social security because right now it is scheduled to go bankrupt in 2033.  

And then for people who are under the age of 55, we gradually begin to elevate the age because remember when it was put in place, the average age of death in America was 63. And now we are talking 80. We have been very negligent in terms of adjusting, so that’s why we need to do the 20% thing, but I think that would work very effectively.

More from this channel