the fact that you are earning your income and you will get a check that supplements your income from the government. it is based on the fact that you are working, you are earning your income. i hear people complain about this all the time but don't articulate it completely. they say, people are on the couch, not working, we have to change the system. you are right, but for some of those folks, they are confronted with the ugly truth that if they did get off the couch and went to work, they would make less. representative ryan: in some cases, without it, a person would lose materially if they take the job. the eitc helps reduce that problem. governor christie: that's right. that is why doubling it made so much sense. remember, our state is a very high cost state. everything is a bit more in other than it is

parts in the country. this gap grows even wider in a state like mine. one of the things that we did not talk about that is a barrier that we have to address and the federal government is doing the wrong way -- dealing with drug addiction. drug addiction is the huge part of the debilitating cycle. when folks lose hope, a lot of them turn, out of desperation, to drugs. then we have a situation where incarceration goes higher because of the policies of the federal government. that is why, in new jersey, one of the things we did, we said, if you are a first time nonviolent drug offender, you do not go to prison anymore. you go to mandatory inpatient drug treatment. this is the disease. if we continue to treat it where you are not a violent prison and

making a profit off of it, you are an addict. if we put them in jail, and don't give them treatment, and release him from jail, and wonder why they don't get a job, they don't play a role in raising their children -- of course they don't. they are suffering from a disease that prevents them from doing it. it has been 30 years or so of the war on drugs. which has been focused on incarceration and enforcement. there will always be jail cells for people committing violent acts, but we need to get people who are addicts and diseased out of those jail cells and give them treatment. you cannot go to work if you cannot get out of bed in the morning. you cannot get work if you are high on heroin or cocaine. no one will hire you. we talk about the various. -- the barriers. our policies of the federal government are doing nothing to

deal with the real problem that we have which is people can be treated. this is the disease. we can make people better. when we do that, we do what ben was talking about which is rebuild families. when a father, a daughter, a sister, a brother comes back healthy, you cannot calculate the positive effect that has on a family or community. we need to do more of that. that is one of the barriers of poverty. the power to treat people, not incarcerate people. [applause] senator scott: it is an important point. governor bush: it is an important point. 50% are incarcerated for drug offenses. not the dealing, but the use.

this is an area where conservatives and the president agreed. the president's impulse is to use the clemency process. rather than engage with the speaker and majority leader to deal -- the other point that is important is to give people a second chance. if you believe that marriage is important, and it is, and you believe that work is important, if you have a record, you cannot get a job. increasingly, men are becoming obsolete in lower income communities. we have to make sure that they are empowered to do their job. i think that withholding adjudication as part of the element is a key element. if you are on the road to recovery, your crime, whatever it was, would be wiped out. the employment reforms that some of the larger corporations are looking at -- we have to make sure that people have access to

opportunities that exist. the other thing, on earned income tax credit, if you are 21-25, you cannot get it. i think the earned income tax credit needs to be extended to them. you need to get men engaged in the workforce again. you cannot have a society where they are obsolete. we see it play out. we see the criminal justice system be overwhelmed. this is an area where there is common ground left and right. i hope you get the president action do his job. -- to actually do his job. [applause] representative ryan: i think there is a common misconception that the eitc is part of welfare. it is not. it is a milton friedman

idea. the problem is there is so much fraud -- we have to go after the fraud. we have to make it something you see at the end of your paycheck. it is a lump sum at the end of the year. you do not see the seal that it makes sense to work. governor christie: one of the things we did in new jersey was to empower deal was the treasury to do a fraud investigation. we eliminated a good amount of the fraud and made an example for those who are doing it. that helped to reinforce everyone's confidence in the program. part of the deal we made was we will agree to double the eitc, but you need to agree to empower

the state treasurer to give the public credit and confidence in it credit for the fact that they are willing to step up and help folks, but also confidence that we are not just throwing the money in the fireplace. senator scott: ben? mr. carson: it may not be a popular thing to say, but the earned income tax credit, any manipulation of the tax system, for whatever good reason, i generally don't agree with. i think we need to make the income tax system very simple and extremely fair, and stop having all these different variations because -- [applause] mr. carson: what those things do, they create bureaucracy.

it feeds the system. the system is already too big. we have 4.1 million federal employees. we have 645 agencies. we can keep finding reasons to do more things. i think the way that we handled the situation is to begin to teach the populace that if you can stay at home and get government subsidies, or get a minimum wage job, maybe get a little more staying at home. let's teach those people that when you go to work, you meet people, they get opportunities and they are much better off than the person sitting at home receiving those things. that is the can-do attitude that made america great, not the "what can you do" attitude that is taking us down. [applause] governor christie: i'm all for

the president making those statements and making work something more than just the paycheck that you get. the practical fact of the matter is when you actually look at the way these programs work and the responsibility for measuring them, the presence rhetoric is the president's rhetoric will not make it so that somebody who , thatose their apartment person will not make that decision, no matter how much the president tells them they can go up the ladder, but they say, i'm losing my apartment, i'm not going to put my children on the street. we have to be practical. jeb said this before. if we started from the beginning, we could do things a lot differently. we have to be practical about this in this respect.

if we say, we are not going to give people that choice, we are going to speak to them about it, they will not make the choice. we will not change what is happening in this country. i'm not saying that every one of these programs is perfect. eitc is embedded in what is already our tax system in new jersey. the bigger problem is we have to figure out a way to reverse what this president has done over the last seven years which is to make people more comfortable on with dependence. [applause] senator scott: let's stay on the topic of taxes. you talked about repatriation.

you add on top of that that corporate inversions have been happening. one way to impact that is lower the tax rate. you came up with a tax plan to do that. mr. carson: why does congress have the ability to impose taxes? it was to run the government. it was not to affect people's behavior. we need to get back to the basics. i want a completely flat tax. everybody pays exactly the same rate. i base that on the bible. god is a pretty fair guy.

[applause] mr. carson: he did not say if your crops fell, you don't me anything. everybody needs to have skin in the game. we are compassionate. pay a minimus to tax because everybody has to have skin in the game. it doesn't make any sense to me for people not to pay any taxes but have a say on how much the y.hers papere no deductions and no loopholes. people will always manipulate everything to find a way to take it vantage of best to take

advantage -- to find a way to take advantage. billionwho makes $10 pays a billion dollars and the guy who makes to know is pays one. people say that is not fair billionthat guy has $9 that is called socialism. that does not work in america. say myre those who mortgage to the action, i will lose my house. you will have a lot more money. you don't need the mortgage deduction. those who say the churches will disappear because there will be any reason for people to give. before 1913 when the federal income tax system was imposed, there were lots of churches. there were lots of charities all over our country because the

american people are the most generous and charitable people on the face of their. -- on the face of the earth. we don't need incentive like that to be charitable to our fellow men. think about what happened is this country was developing and growing. communities separated by hundreds of miles. people cared about each other. if it was harvest time and a farmer was in the street aching apples and he fell and broke his leg come everyone else pitched in and for harvested his crops. that is how we used to be as a society. we have to reject all these trying toof hatred create division amongst us and make us think there is a war on women and race wars and income wars and age wars and religious wars. crap.a bunch of k [applause] unityrength lies in our

and our compassion. we are americans and we take care of each other and when we learned that, we will also have policies that are fair that will not pick and choose winners and losers. that is the basis of the tax program i came up with. >> i want to follow up on the grizzly bears. >> one thing we have accomplished in this society is we have dramatically reduced death by grizzly bears. [laughter] [applause] there is a big macro point we are talking about. the poverty trap is desensitizing people from going from welfare to work to building their lives. ,ook at the marginal tax rate the highest tax rate payer is not aaron rodgers and warren buffett. it is the single mom with two

20-30,000 dollars to loses to go to work $.80 on the dollar if she makes that next step because of the way the poverty trap is done. we have to think about how to reduce those barriers. there's a human component to this. the economics and the numbers and the map figure out. there is this human component. corporaloned punishment at the liberty charter school. >> i did not participate, just for the record. >> we are not endorsing corporal punishment. >> my mother did, though. i would to catholic grade school and junior high. i had nuns for most of my teachers. it developed in me a healthy

fear of nuns. but i learned lots of lessons, lots of skills. we're talking about drug addiction. there are amazing stories out there -- go to san antonio. program, they have dozens around america, they are going out and ministering to getting them in the program, living with them for months at a time and turning them around and the recidivism rates are plummeting. and that is heroine. stories ofhese great people actually seceding -- succeeding and achieving. we get the economics right, but it is that person-to-person passion ande using community, church, religion -- you did this in the education component. , how do youo that

get the federal government to respect people and make those kinds of connections flourish? we see these things in spite of the barriers come in spite of the arrogance of washington. how do you change that so we have more of that human interaction? >> just like a lot of things, scale is about the only way you can access it. you have to hire lobbyists, you , youto have constituencies come to the congress or come to the bureaucracy with scale. you become the incumbent and you spend your energy protecting your franchise. not just on social service programs, but across the spectrum, that is how it works. the startups, this ruptures in -- theial service arena disrupters in the social service arena don't have a chance.

aese are people that have spark, they are focused, this is defining themselves, this is how they define themselves. you're not doing this because it is a business or agency. they talk about acting on their heart and helping people, saving them in ways that is inspiring and they have no access. the better way to do this is to shift as much power away from washington, d.c. whether it's our medicaid program, education program, job training, all of these social service programs come if we can start a new and create outcome based measurements, we would have a much more flourishing social service sector where people in the communities could be able to access these moneys. the other thing that is important -- when my brother

became president, he started an initiative -- anyone successful -- it did mobilize folks to --rt tearing down barriers .t has become different now to create a place where they can use their access into the moneys would be important an as well. the person who introduced me today is anita zucker. she was living in a trailer in

florida at one point. she is now a billionaire. the point is -- >> i see your point. [laughter] success,ct is, her listening to her over the last one in five years come on worship -- the last 45 years come entrepreneurship is so that those of us mired in poverty looking for a way out, we look for access to capital. today, the regulatory environment created through dodd frank makes stories like anita zucker's and mine far more difficult. guerrillan absolute standing on the chest of would-be entrepreneurs. look at the poorest communities throughout the country, they lack entrepreneurs. how do we fix that? >> i see this every day as the governor because we are seeing across our state, closing of temmunity and start t chartered banks.

they simply cannot keep up with the regulatory requirements and they are afraid. they are afraid if they make a loan that doesn't go well, that they will come in and audit them in bankrupt them with hiring accounting and lawyers to protect them against the federal government. , thethey did in dodd frank federal government sees a problem and react emotionally because they want to get on tv. access to something without beginning to understand or care what the collateral damage is going to be. collateral damage has been to entrepreneurs like you are talking about. the businesses that have already been started in communities all over this country who say they are having some success, so they want to hire more employees or open up a second shop.

they need credit. they are not going to citibank or jpmorgan or wells fargo to get it. the loans are not big enough and they are not stable enough to be able to get those places to give them the money. this is when you go to the guy or woman down the street who runs the community bank who knows you and frequency or shop. they are willing to take a risk on you. the way it is now because the federal government got involved, that community bank are more times than not say to the entrepreneur, listen, i would love to help you, but i have these auditors and new regulations and you don't meet all of them. i wish you the best of luck. this is one of those either cynical and understood collateral damages or the fact that they did not even read the and did noty understand what it was going to do.

the president has to look at this and say for these take big to fail banks that have hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, they can comply with these regulations. they created the problem in 2008 that crippled our economy. but not the small -- [applause] was not the small community bank in new jersey or florida. unavailability of capital to people trying to take a great idea and turn it into a great business. [applause] >> there's an element that is becoming more talked about now in the political square. it is a serious issue. if cannot be an entrepreneur you're in a community that has increasing crime rates. you cannot get insurance, you cannot start your business, people don't have confidence.

we are seeing increases in crime in the big cities that are deeply disturbing. we need to have a conversation about how we support local law enforcement so they can get back to community policing. 99.99% of the time, they are protecting innocent people who feel threatened by the gangsters and criminals in these communities that exist. you cannot create an environment where people will create jobs in the communities where unemployment rates are high and you have permanent dependency on government lets you create safe streets. -- unless you create safe streets. [applause] >> we've got to governor's weapon involved in education policy in their states. you are an education success story. level you at the federal fix this problem so that as you describe and as your mom drilled into you, you get

people a good education? what we do at the federal level to treat this problem? >> let me briefly say something .bout regulations all these federal regulations cost us in terms of goods and services and it's the most regressive tax there is because everybody has to pay it. when you go into the store to buy a box of detergent and it's gone up $.10 because of regulations, who does that hurt? the poor person. the middle class person may be notices when they get to the cash register. in addition to stifling the innovation and entrepreneurship, it is hurting the middle class

and the poor people in our country immeasurably. you have people like bernie sanders and hillary clinton who say it is that all of the rich. it is the fault of the government who continues to compile these regulations on us. [applause] educationalof policy and the government, the best education we have found -- i like to base things on evidence and not on ideology. educated, are best homeschoolers. next best are going to be private schoolers and then charter schoolers and in public schoolers. that's not to say public schools are bad. some are outstanding. we have so many that are not. the only way to solve this problem is to provide school choice.

school choice is done through vouchers that are mediated through the states and not through the federal government. the closer to home, the better it will be. that way, the voters in that state have something to say about it. that is one of the problems that that ween as a society begin to do more and more centralization. when you centralize things, you take away the ability of the populace in this country is supposed to be of, for and by the people. -- at least a very large number of federal programs need to be block granted back to the states at 80%. that saves us money at the federal level and we tell the states come if you can administer this program and it cost you less than the amount block granted, you can use the rest of it for whatever you want to. that will incentivize them to be efficient and will make the

people pay attention to what is going on. that is especially true in education. say in the inner cities, why are pretty percent of those kids dropping out of high school? those kids are observant. they look around and say i'm not getting educated, anyway. those are situations we have to avoid. we have to compete with china with 1.4 billion people, india with 1.1 billion. for every kid we can keep from going down that path to self-destruction, that's one less person we have to be afraid of and protect our families from. one less person we have to pay for. we cannot afford to throw any of our people away.

[applause] the other thing we have to recognize is a huge political element to this, too. the most destructive force is the teachers union. it is the single most destructive force. [applause] >> we got a lot of reforms done. tenure in new jersey. we set up a public school choice program. we increased our charters to the largest number we had in new jersey. people really enjoyed it. the teachers union felt incredibly threatened. million to the legislative democrats in my state in the year of us running for reelection because they were concerned i was going to win by so much that -- they gave $20 million. the day after i was reelected

with 61% of the boat and we made no gains in the state legislature because of that $20 , the leaderspent came to me and said no more education reform for your second term. we took the money from them and the process was we would not do anything. in new jersey alone, the teachers union has 200,000 members. they collect mandatory dues of $730 per person per year. $140 million the teachers union collects a year. teacher nothing toward salary, teacher pension or teacher health care. a wonder $40 million political slush fund to punish their enemies. imagine that kind of force and it is replicated in state after state in this country. yet, we have all kinds of people in this country who are poor school choice, or all the things

been just talked about and what do they pay for? another white paper that tells us what ben just told us. stop paying for white papers. get your hands dirty and start paying for people in public office who will support the positions you've got. right now, the teachers union is absolutely a subsidiary of the democratic party and we to an already -- we have seen already that they've endorsed hillary clinton. that she isht bought and paid for. the politics is a large part of what is stopping this. we need a president to say the teachers union will not be a part of the solution. we need to change the laws state-by-state. by governor walker did in wisconsin. [applause] >> we have to recall elections

in wisconsin. -- two recalls an election. -- two recall elections in wisconsin. we've had these bites as well. we've seen the fights play out at the state level. woodson calls the status quo in the poverty space the poverty industrial complex. there is this entrenched special interest at the national level that is there to just protect the status quo. we have 80 different programs, this huge budget and they fund the status quo. they fund the interest groups, they fund doing the same thing over and over. and we will get the predictable results which is why the war on poverty is clearly a stalemate. how do you take this fight on at the national level?

had do you challenge the complexes and interest groups and succeed at the national level? >> i don't think we should try to do it at the national level. you break it down by having a speakert working with a , convincing the senate to say of the state wants to tickets early childhood education grant -- florida has the largest voucher program in the country. it helps us with our early literacy efforts. we've had the greatest gains in learning for the little guys in the country. we started at a low base. hispanic and african-american kids in the top five learning . if the state of florida wanted to expand its four-year-old program, collapse this money,

give it to the state and hold us to better outcomes. you eliminate infrastructure around this money that does fight to keep the system in place. headstart is an $8,000 a year per kid number. a be in florida, we have better outcomes with lower costs and maybe we should be able to have that power. along the way, we are empowering church-based organizations because it is an essential element of their mission now. all of the organizations are providing the service. what is wrong with that? why does it have to be this top-down approach? on the title i money, is it essential to have this bureaucracy around title i money? 80% of the bureaucrats and the department of education in tallahassee were there to fill out the forms for 10% of the money that goes to education.

joke.s a we are not improving education because we have bureaucrats on one side filling out forms for bureaucrats on the other side. no one seems to care of kids aren't learning because they are not. flip this around on its head and focus on getting learning gains. education should be about children learning, not about the economic interests of the adults. let the states do it. not every state would. california will be the first place where this will happen. it could happen here in south carolina. >> it could happen in florida. then it becomes an example for other people to follow. [applause] >> this is where conservative principles make a difference. this is where conservative principles apply to this problem. it is federalism. at the end of the day, what ends

up happening in these debates at -- federal level, the essay basic block grants mean you don't care. you are not prioritizing it. if you don't make this a national priority, a federal program with a federal agency, you really don't care. that mindset has given us these results we have today. block grants means you have to care so much that you want to empower people who are on the ground fighting the problem in getting them the tools they need to solve these problems because they screwed it up at the federal level. >> i was contributing money to the problem -- how does that indicate not caring? this is about folks in the federal government who have a philosophy that they get to pick the winners and losers. --y care less about success i proposed to eliminate the corporate business tax completely in new jersey. the democrats came back to me with a tax credit type program

and i said they kept increasing the program for job creation. all you are doing is eliminating corporate tax through the back door because there will be less corporate tax we bring in. one of the leaders said then we get to decide who gets the money. that is the philosophy. that is the difference. they want to decide who gets what. our view is we just want it to be successful. i don't care who is successful. i don't care whether it's someone i've never met before in my life or someone i have come i don't care whether it's someone i like or don't like, i want great ideas to be rewarded in this country again. not people in washington picking winners and losers. [applause] washingtons in

making those decisions are so $108,000 permaking employee -- the teacher is making $50,000. making sure we eliminate funding at the federal level as possible only means good things for the students. [applause] >> look around the back, you will see students on the front -- you've donees a great job in florida of making sure that k12 sticks in a profound way. jobs of the future. 44% of the jobs of the future will be the middle skill jobs. you don't quite need the bachelor's degree but more than a high school diploma. how do we make sure those jobs are filled by our kids? when i was in high school,

they used to have vocational education. you can learn how to become an electrician, a plumber, welding. i was talking to the ceo of a big company and he said i cannot find any welders. i would gladly pay an apprentice welder. you are not going to get that out of college. there are recognize whole multitudes of different talents and skills that are important to make a society work. you don't have to be a neurosurgeon, you can be a plumber. a neurosurgeon had some plumbing work done and the plumber gave him a bill. it was $2700. the plumber said i didn't get that when i was in the research

and either. that was a neurosurgeon either. -- when i was a neurosurgeon either. the variety of skills that are necessary a society like ours flourish. we need to think about innovation in education. there are computer programs that can look away a kid sells five algebra problems. can go back and bring them up to speed. the out of a teacher can only do it for one student at a time. ae program can do it for whole class, a whole city, a whole state. we need to take advantage of that, particularly to close the gap with stem problems. we can which on -- we can work on virtual classrooms and take the best teachers putting them in front of millions of students

in front of millions of students at a time. what do you get for being a good teacher? unlike the private sector, you get more work to do. that discourages them. a whole conglomeration of things we need to look at on the but recognized in the agricultural age we can produce more corn wheat and barley than anyone. it didn't matter whether you could solve a quadratic equation. in the industrial age all you needed was a strong back and a willingness to work. now we are in the information age, the technological age. we must adjust. you go into a factory, you won't see a whole lot of people in there. but the ones in there are working on a computer.

they are doing lots of things that are technologically oriented. we just need to take that to the next level. >> a lot of conversations relates to them. we have these systems in government. government is a mid-20th-century industrial model. the world has radically changed. differenting in a world. washington isn't going to be a place where these breakthroughs take place. to follow-up on what you said, imagine a system because we have technologies to follow this, where you move to a competency-based model. where a child reaches his god-given ability each and every year so they can do the work in half a year to get a years worth of knowledge. they can get an aa degree from graduating from high school. we have a funding model based in

the 1950's or even earlier, what 120, 802080 days -- days. you have a system where you reward improvement were kids who struggle are not just pushed back, they have to master the material, and kids that can excel can do it faster, you would deal with this learning cap at is one of the great challenges for kids stuck in poverty. he would do it at a far faster rate. we are not going to do it from washington because 10% of the education dollars come from washington. you have courageous politicians who take on these very powerful economic interests, and then the federal government should reward them. we shouldn't fund the beast. we should be funding people who have the strength and character to take on this obsolete to system, to liberate teachers to be able to do what they can do.

and harnessing technology is a key element of that. it can be done, but it is not going to happen unless state legislators across the state do it. about building off of what jeff said, i think about how obsolete our entire system is. it's the same as it was in the 19th century. one person standing in front in ,ront of a black or white board when we used to have to get those kids out of school to go into the fields based on the agrarian calendar. if the rest of the world is spending much more time at andol, longer school days longer school years, we need to go to that model. think about all of us now. children don't just learn differently.

any adults have problems with their smartphones, you hand it to your 13-year-old child. to bridget when i can't figure it out. she is 12 years old and she hits a couple of buttons. their minds work differently. they have been exposed to something we were never exposed to their age -- two at their age. why not use the advantage we now get from that? i see with my kids every morning when i take them to school, they are lugging these things. to spend money this way and push it that way, the way the federal government can do it is make sure we can improve technology. every kid should be carrying an ipad. you can download a set of out needed books -- outdated books.

and they are more comfortable working on that stuff than we are. we may feel like the world is passing us by based on the way we used to do it. here is the ugly news, it is. to do is make sure our kids are given that technology. their minds are working differently, let's adjust. we are not compensating teachers based on their stats. we are basing bit -- we are competent and based on how long they are there. sometimes how long you are there is an indication of your success, sometimes it is the opposite. a teacher was late to school 100 times in two years. and the school district finally fired the teacher, and the arbitrator reinstated the teacher. , this isem like that just one example of what is happening thousands of times.

these have no shot -- these kids have no shot. your day is over, you have failed, your day is over. [applause] >> we are down to our last three minutes. time for us to wrap it up. expectationset the of the american people to look to conservatives of solving the problem of poverty? haveut any question, we heard some good ideas that can work anywhere, anytime, and any place in america. how can the paradigm shift happen? >> one minute each. >> i think we have to be willing to go into the den of the lion. last spring when i went to the national action network, everyone thought i was nuts.

when i started talking to people about empowerment, turning your own dollars to create wealth about the effects does, aboutation the many contributions and black people make toward america. he had so many inventions. people would say, is that the real mccoy? finished i i got went to the national -- national association of latino effects. aboute go there and talk what we believe, they resonate with it. we have much better policies than the democrats do.

>> the good news is we have a huge opportunity here. the president's policies have failed. now we have to act. and our ideas are the best ideas. the -- people know what we have today is failed. that is the better way of going. >> this is in essence a political question, because if you don't put the political muscle behind -- we should stop going to the