Ben Carson, the newly appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, on Wednesday during a SiriusXM interview described poverty as a "state of mind."
“I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind," he said. "You take somebody who has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street and I guarantee you in a little while they'll be right back up there. And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they'll work their way back down to the bottom."
Carson, a celebrated neurosurgeon before turning to politics, has long insisted on an ethics of individual responsibility. Earlier this month, he suggested that public housing shouldn't be too comfortable for its residents, and in March he referred to slaves as immigrants who believed in the idea of America as a "land of dreams and opportunity."
Source: chicagotribune.com
