Story highlights Issac Bailey: Ben Carson has never managed anything close to size of HUD

Carson doesn't understand why government needs to play role in lives of poor, he says

Issac Bailey has been a journalist in South Carolina for two decades and was most recently the primary columnist for The Sun News in Myrtle Beach. He was a 2014 Harvard University Nieman fellow. Follow him on Twitter: @ijbailey. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) It's fitting that President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Dr. Ben Carson as his nominee for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One man uniquely unqualified for the job he is about to undertake wants another one in a similar position, each with the ability to cause great harm to the most vulnerable Americans because of his over-inflated sense of self.

Carson is a brilliant, pioneering neurosurgeon who backed Trump after he gave up on his own bid to become president and rose to national political prominence by challenging President Barack Obama during the National Prayer Breakfast, instantly earning credibility from the far right. But he has no government experience and never managed anything close to the size of HUD, an agency that has a $47 billion budget and helps 5 million low-income families.

Issac Bailey

What's more is that he seems convinced that government is the problem and largely incapable of helping the already-vulnerable without hurting them even more.

"These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse," he wrote in an op-ed in June 2015. "There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous."

He seemed not to fully understand the programs he was criticizing. He talked down the use of busing to integrate schools without realizing that the controversial program was found to be one of the most effective tools in closing the achievement gap between black students and white students. He ignores the incredible progress government programs have made in curbing poverty. More than half of black Americans lived in poverty in the years before the war on poverty began; that number has been cut by half. And in 2015, the Census Bureau recorded the largest annual drop in the poverty rate since 1968.

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