GOP candidate Ben Carson Monday announced his plan for a 14.9 percent flat tax on all Americans, saying that everyone will pay their share regardless of their income levels.
"It would be about 14.9 percent precisely, because we worked out all the numbers very specifically," said Carson, revealing his plan exclusively on
Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "No deductions, no loopholes, applies to everybody across the board."
Taxation exists, he continued, because money is needed to run the government, not "to control people's behavior and do all these other things [that are] added in with this 80,000 pages of tax regulations."
He said he also wants to bring the corporate tax rate into alignment with everything else, at 14.9 percent.
And everyone would be paying a tax, said Carson, but for people below the poverty level, "we have mechanism where they still contribute something. It may not be at the 14.9 percent, because we don't want to add to their woes, but we do have other things in place to try to increase their opportunities.
"We're looking to provide a ladder to move people upward, because we only have 330 million people, and we've got to develop all of them if we're going to compete with China with 1.4 billion in India and places like that," said Carson.
Carson also discussed last week's shake-up in his campaign, which ended up with his campaign manager Barry Bennett, deputy campaign manager Lisa Coen and communications director Doug Watts stepping down.
The resignations were spurred by ongoing disagreements between Bennett and Carson's friend and adviser Armstrong Williams, but on Monday, Carson downplayed the upheaval, coming just a month before the first GOP caucus in Iowa on Feb. 1.
"When things are not working you have to analyze them very carefully and you have to be willing to make changes," said Carson. "There were a few people who couldn't live with those changes and we gave them an opportunity to resign . . . the esprit de corps is much better now."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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