MADDOG10's Blog

 

Ron Kirby holds a sign while marching in protest of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 26, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Image credit: Getty Images North America via @daylife)

Update: At the bottom of this post, the author responds to criticism of his argument. Over at National Journal Avik Roy says the critics are missing the point of Conover’s post.

It was one of candidate Obama’s most vivid and concrete campaign promises. Forget about high minded (some might say high sounding) but gauzy promises of hope and change. This candidate solemnly pledged on June 5, 2008: “In an Obama administration, we’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year….. We’ll do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States.”  Unfortunately, the experts working for Medicare’s actuary have (yet again^[1]) reported that in its first 10 years, Obamacare will boost health spending by “roughly $621 billion” above the amounts Americans would have spent without this misguided law.

What this means for a typical family of four

$621 billion is a pretty eye-glazing number. Most readers will find it easier to think about how this number translates to a typical American family—the very family candidate Obama promised would see $2,500 in annual savings as far as the eye could see. So I have taken the latest year-by-year projections, divided by the projected U.S. population to determine the added amount per person and multiplied the result by 4.

Interactive Guide: What Will Obamacare Cost You?

Simplistic? Maybe, but so too was the President’s campaign promise. And this approach allows us to see just how badly that promise fell short of the mark. Between 2014 and 2022, the increase in national health spending (which the Medicare actuaries specifically attribute to the law) amounts to $7,450 per family of 4.

                                                         No, Obamacare Is Not A Good Deal For Young People In The Long Run, Not Even Close                          Chris Conover                      Contributor

Let us hope this family hasn’t already spent or borrowed the $22,500 in savings they might have expected over this same period had they taken candidate Obama’s promise at face value. In truth, no well-informed American ever should have believed this absurd promise. At the time, Factcheck.org charitably deemed this claim as “overly optimistic, misleading and, to some extent, contradicted by one of his own advisers.”  The Washington Post less charitably awarded it Two Pinocchios (“Significant omissions or exaggerations”). Yet rather than learn from his mistakes, President Obama on July 16, 2012 essentially doubled-down on his promise, assuring small business owners “your premiums will go down.” He made this assertion notwithstanding the fact that in three separate reports between April 2010 and June 2012, the Medicare actuaries had demonstrated that the ACA would increase health spending. To its credit, the Washington Post dutifully awarded the 2012 claim Three Pinocchios (“Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”)

The past is not prologue: The burden increases ten-fold in 2014

As it turns out, the average family of 4 has only had to face a relatively modest burden from Obamacare over the past four years—a little over $125. Unfortunately, this year’s average burden ($66) will be 10 times as large in 2014 when Obamacare kicks in for earnest. And it will rise for two years after that, after which it hit a steady-state level of just under $800 a year. Of course, all these figures are in nominal dollars. In terms of today’s purchasing power, this annual amount will decline somewhat [corrected as per update 5 below].

But what happened to the spending slowdown?

Some readers may recall that a few months ago, there were widespread reports of a slow-down in health spending. Not surprisingly, the White House has been quick to claim credit for the slowdown in health spending documented in the health spending projections report, arguing that it “is good for families, jobs and the budget.”

On this blog, Avik Roy pointed out that a) since passage of Obamacare, U.S. health spending actually had risen faster than in OECD countries, whereas prior to the law, the opposite was true. Moreover, to the degree that U.S. health spending was slowing down relative to its own recent past, greater cost-sharing was likely to be the principal explanation. Medicare’s actuarial experts confirm that the lion’s share of the slowdown in health spending could be chalked up to slow growth in the economy and greater cost-sharing. As AEI scholar Jim Capretta pithily put it:

An important takeaway from these new projections is that the CMS Office of the Actuary finds no evidence to link the 2010 health care law to the recent slowdown in health care cost escalation. Indeed, the authors of the projections make it clear that the slowdown is not out of line with the historical link between health spending growth and economic conditions (emphasis added).

In the interests of fair and honest reporting, perhaps it is time the mainstream media begin using “Affordable” Care Act whenever reference is made to this terribly misguided law. Anyone obviously is welcome to quarrel with the Medicare actuary about their numbers. I myself am hard-put to challenge their central conclusion: Obamacare will not save Americans one penny now or in the future. Perhaps the next time voters encounter a politician making such grandiose claims, they will learn to watch their wallet. Until then, let’s spare strapped Americans from having to find $657 in spare change between their couch cushions next year. Let’s delay this law for a year so that policymakers have time to fix the poorly designed Rube Goldberg device known as Obamacare. For a nation with the most complicated and expensive health system on the planet, making it even more complicated and even more expensive never was a good idea. 

UPDATE 1: Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress has declared this article is “totally wrong.” Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’ Paul Van de Water “described this calculation as one of the stupidest things he’s read in a long time” asserting that I’ve calculated “an average that doesn’t mean anything for anyone.”  To his credit, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber at least concedes my basic point: “The bottom line is that the government has consistently reported that Obamacare will raise national health spending by about 1 to 2 percent.”  But then goes on to say ““This is a small fraction of the typical 5 to 7 percent annual growth rate in health care – and is a small price to pay for insuring 30 million or more Americans.”  Notably absent from Mr. Volsky’s scathing critique is any mention of the person who started this use of a “typical American family:” President Obama.  Most important, Professor Gruber’s point essentially substantiates my own: it was the President’s claim of $2500 premium savings for the “typical” family that was and continues to be totally wrong. It’s simply not possible for national health spending to rise by $621 billion and for the “typical” family to expect a $2500 (per year!!!!) premium reduction. Did Paul Van de Water or anyone else at CBPP call candidate Obama’s promise “one of the stupidest things he’s read in a long time”? If not, why not?

People are welcome to argue that Obamacare is a great deal, that it’s worth all that added spending to get extra coverage for tens of millions of Americans. But of course, that’s not how Obamacare was sold. Rather than tell Americans the truth that they’d have to pay more and that the extra price was worth it, candidate Obama promised the ultimate free lunch: we’ll cover 30 million uninsured AND the typical family will see their premiums go down by $2500 (per year!!!!).  And Jonathan Gruber seems to have changed his tune since the fierce debates about health reform, since as Avik Roy has recounted,   “What we know for sure,” Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber told Ezra Klein in 2009, “is that [the bill] will lower the cost of buying non-group health insurance.”   Obamacare was sold on the promise that it would not increase health spending or the deficit or increase taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year  [“I can make a firm pledge under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”]  Every one of these promises/claims/predictions turned out to be totally wrong.  We can start having a productive debate when progressives are willing to concede these simple, easily demonstrable empirical claims. And then perhaps we can move on to junking this unworkable law and replacing it with the world-class patient-centered health system Americans deserve.

UPDATE 2: Wonkette is the latest to weigh in on the purported  stupidity of my post: “In other words, this is incredibly stupid. Sure, the latest Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services report [PDF] says that “Obamacare” will lead to “roughly $621 billion” in additional health spending over the next ten years. But that emphatically does not mean that you, me, and the other two members of our typical family will be paying this money out of pocket. Most of it will be paid out by insurance companies, who will have a whole bunch of new policyholders because of Obamacare. Much of it will be paid by the government in subsidies and increased Medicaid enrollment. And yes, some of it will be paid by healthy (for now), well-off (for now) young (for now!) people who would otherwise forgo insurance and roll the dice on not ever being carted to the hospital in an ambulance” (emphasis added).

Wonkette’s attitude about the $621B illustrates precisely the attitude that has led to the mess we’re in (both related to Obamacare specifically, and entitlements more generally). “Don’t worry. Families won’t have to pay the tab. We’ll stick it to greedy insurance companies or Uncle Sam will cover it. No problem!”  But of course, we can be pretty certain that insurance companies (especially if they are greedy!) are unlikely to be paying for any tab without turning around and passing that cost along to (gasp!) American families. Similarly, Uncle Sam has nowhere else but American families to keep replenishing tax coffers. In short, American families manifestly WILL be absorbing every single penny of the $621B in added health spending created by Obamacare and it is intellectually disingenuous (and certainly no contribution to informed public debate) to pretend otherwise.

UPDATE 3: Avik Roy at NRO has done a splendid job of explaining the genesis of President Obama’s original estimate of $2500 savings for the “typical family.” It’s essentially identical to the method used for my own calculation. Avik’s post also includes a very entertaining montage of the number of times President Obama made this claim. I encouraged anyone interested in actually understanding this issue to read his piece.

UPDATE 4: Reader Thomas Rudder makes the following comments (submitted on 2013/09/24 at 4:53 pm for anyone who cares to read his comment in its entirety): ”Authors presentation of CMS report is not accurate.” “ACA is summed up in the final sentence of the CMS Major Findings, ***it is still slower growth than over the longer-term history*** ACA Saves according to this report.”  I’m not trying to single out Mr. Rudder, but his is the clearest articulation of an apparent misunderstanding of the CMS report that I’ve observed in quite a number of comments I’ve received.

To be sure, there has been a slowdown in the growth of health spending. But it is manifestly NOT due to Obamacare. The whole point of Tables 2 and 2a in that report was to compare a set of projections assuming ACA was in place to an alternative set of projections in which ACA was assumed NOT to be implemented, i.e., that the pre-Obamacare world had simply continued forward until 2022, inclusive of slightly rising numbers of uninsured etc. The critical point Mr. Rudder and other readers seemed to have missed is that the recent slowdown in health spending happens in both scenarios. Why? Because the slowdown in spending relates principally to the slowdown in the economy and to more cost-sharing such as the growing number of Americans who have jumped into high deductible health plans. The reason we know for certain is not the cause of the observed slowdown in spending is because in every single year from 2010-2022, health spending is higher in the set of projections that assumes ACA is implemented than in the scenario in which it is not (readers can examine the tables themselves if they have any doubt on this fundamental point).  If Obamacare truly slowed down health spending more than in the counterfactual world without it, then it obviously would make no sense that spending would be $621B higher under Obamacare than without it. In short, the CMS report manifestly is NOT drawing the conclusion Mr. Rudder erroneously attributes to it.

Once Obamacare proponents reluctantly reach the conclusion that Obamacare will increase national health spending, many seem to want to switch to the argument that of course spending rose since we’re covering more people. I agree, it is pretty obvious we should have expected that to happen, but unfortunately, that’s not the way candidate Obama and his advisors saw it. They were convinced their plan–notwithstanding its expansion of coverage for tens of millions of uninsured–would SAVE $200 billion in health spending a year, which translated into roughly $2500 a year. And candidate Obama’s claim that he could pull this astonishing feat off before the end of his first term was not some off-script overenthusiastic bit of puffery that occurred during a campaign speech. As Kevin Sacks at the NYT reported: “Mr. Obama’s economic policy director, Jason Furman, said the campaign’s estimates were conservative and asserted that much of the savings would come quickly. “We think we could get to $2,500 in savings by the end of the first term, or be very close to it,” Mr. Furman said.”  Thus, the savings was not some long-term aspiration to “bend the cost curve” that would happen down the road outside of the range of the latest CMS projection (as many other readers have claimed).

In my post, I have avoided trying to speculate on whether the President was delusional. lying or simply mistaken in his forecast (readers can view below the many instances in which he made this claim and draw their own conclusions).  The indisputable truth is he was dead wrong–not even close to hitting the mark. That was the simple take-home message I’d hope to deliver in my piece, but which way too many readers appear to be furiously shutting their eyes to see.  It’s hard to have a productive debate about what to do about this terribly misguided law without agreeing on some pretty indisputable facts.

UPDATE 5: Regrettably, in its eagerness to defend Obamacare, Andrew Lazarus at DailyKos has made a flagrant misstatement of fact:  ”The $7450 figure is calculated as a mean, what we colloquially call an average. By “typical”, Obama is evoking the median family.” Unfortunately, Kevin Sacks at NYT (known to many as a newspaper of record) has put on the record exactly how candidate Obama and his advisors came up with their figure of $2500 in premium savings for the “typical family:”

The original arithmetic was somewhat basic. In May 2007, three Harvard professors who are unpaid advisers to the Obama campaign — Mr. Cutler, David Blumenthal and Jeffrey Liebman — produced a memorandum offering their “best guess” that a menu of changes would produce savings of at least $200 billion a year (it has since been revised to $214 billion). That would amount to about 8 percent of the $2.5 trillion in health care spending projected for 2009, when the next president takes office…..The total savings were then divided by the country’s population, multiplied for a family of four, and rounded down slightly to a number that was easy to grasp: $2,500.”

If that calculation sounds familiar, it’s because it’s precisely the one I did in my post–the only difference being that unlike President Obama, I manifestly did NOT characterize the result as the expected change in premiums. It’s the total change in health spending, which will end up being borne in a variety of forms, higher premiums, higher out-of-pocket costs, higher taxes etc. If Obamacare were financed honestly and transparently, we actually could say how much of an increase would be faced by any given family. Because it’s quite the opposite, we have to resort to talking about “average” effects recognizing that some will pay more, some will pay less than this average. Perhaps Mr. Lazarus will do his homework a little better in the future.

I did make an error that Mr. Lazarus was correct to point out and now have deleted this original sentence: “Of course, all these figures are in nominal dollars. In terms of today’s purchasing power, this annual amount will rise steadily.”  It was a goof, pure and simple, for which I apologize. It does not materially affect my central conclusion–that Obamacare increases health spending by many thousands of dollars for the average family of 4–but for wonks who are interested, the $7,450 in present value terms (using the GDP deflator as projected by CBO) is $6,777 in today’s dollars. Somehow I don’t think most Americans will be comforted to learn that the Obamacare hit on their pocketbooks will amount to only $6,777 per family of 4.  Perhaps this will pave the way for Mr. Lazarus to apologize for his own mistake.

Let there be no mistake where this man’s loyalties lie.

Obama uses his own money to keep open a Muslim museum during the government shutdown and at the same time sees to it that WWII veterans are barricaded from their memorial.

Share this story with your Obama supporting friends and ask them for a response!

Source: nationalreport.net

Photo: nationalreport.net

It took more manpower to try to barricade the memorial than it would have to simply keep it open!

An obvious concerted effort by the Obama administration to block our veterans from their natural right to visit their memorial!

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough is waking up to the fact that despite all the hype that accompanied President Barack Obama when he made his 2008 presidential run, he wasn’t ready for primetime.

“Barack Obama has proven over the past five years that he wasn’t ready to be president of the United States,” Scarborough said on his show Tuesday, according to Newsmax. “And he proves it still today.”

Scarborough said Obama “came out of nowhere” as a freshman senator, and “a couple years later, people elected him president of the United States.” 

Obama served less than a decade in the Illinois Senate with a less-than-stellar record that included numerous instances of voting “present.”

He followed that distinguished service with less than a full term in the U.S. Senate, also unimpressive. Most of his time there seemed to be spent running for the presidency.

Yet, solely on the basis that “Barack Obama was against the [Iraq] war,” the Democratic Party “went out and sold him like he was a bag of potato chips, they marketed him [and] he becomes president of the United States,” Scarborough said.

To illustrate his point, the TV host challenged guest Donny Deutsch to “name me a major piece of legislation that Barack Obama passed in the United States Senate, that would suggest that he knew how to work in the United States Senate and would be an effective president of the United States.”

Neither Deutsch nor any of Scarborough’s other guests could.

“You have people that come out of nowhere and get in the Senate. They don’t want to be in the Senate. They don’t want to work for the people that hired them. Immediately, they start running for president of the United States a week after they get to the Senate,” Scarborough said, referring not only to Obama but also U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who Scarborough described Wednesday as a “phony narcissist.”

Scarborough’s comparison of Cruz’s meteoric rise to Obama’s is misplaced.

The president has demonstrated time after time that he tends to take the path of least resistance. When he spoke against the Iraq war, he was among the majority of lawmakers — including many in his own party.

Cruz’s crusade to defund Obamacare is in opposition to his own party leaders. An aide to U.S. Sen. John McCain said that his boss “f**king hates” Cruz, according to The Daily Caller, and The New York Times reported that U.S. Peter King, R-N.Y., called Cruz a “fraud” who promotes “government terrorism.”

Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz described Cruz, a former student, as “off-the-charts brilliant.” Obama has steadfastly refused to release any of his college records.

Prior to being a lawmaker, Obama worked in a law firm and as a community organizer. Cruz actually ran things, directing the Texas Solicitor General’s Office for five years, serving as his state’s first Hispanic solicitor general and the youngest in the United States.

Cruz also served as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, and in the private sector, Cruz led the Morgan, Lewis and Bockius law firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice while a partner there.

But did I mention? Obama was also a community organizer.

“You can go one after another after another,” Scarborough said. “This doesn’t work. The Barack Obama way does not work.”

I agree, but Cruz is not a part of this ilk.

In 2008, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was more qualified for the presidency. She had successfully run a city and a state. Obama, on the other hand, had only run for office.

A special operations team, geared up and about to offer assistance to the Americans trapped at the besieged foreign mission in Benghazi, Libya, was ordered to “hold in place,” a witness testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Thursday.

Adm. Mike Mullen, a member of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board, testified that although technically no “stand down” order was sent to the special forces team, the unit was nonetheless ordered to “hold in place,” according to Breitbart News.

Breitbart reported:

Testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Admiral Mike Mullen said that the direction given to Special Operations Command Africa commander Lt. Col Gibson was to “hold in place” on the night of the attacks.

 

Gibson is the boss of Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya who had testified that a “stand down” order was given to Special Forces who wanted to help Americans who were under assault in Libya.

Whether there was a stand down order has been part of an ongoing debate between administration officials and those who were in Libya during the attack. Those on the ground have vehemently insisted that a stand down order was issued. The administration has steadfastly denied it.

Let’s put an end to the semantics. Whether it was a “stand down” order or a “hold in place” order is of little consequence. It’s a distinction without a difference.

The result was the same. Americans who had every right to expect aid from their government were denied it, and four brave souls are dead. Still a “phony scandal?”

Earlier today, an important hearing regarding the attack on Benghazi was being held by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The parents of the Benghazi heroes who died fighting to protect the US consulate were about to speak.

Then, in a turn of events that’s disgusting even by DC standards, most of the Democrats stood up and walked out. Apparently, they were either protesting or trying to show disrespect — either way, if there was any honor in their districts at all, this would end their careers.

A picture from Rep. Issa’s Twitter account and a list of the names of the congressmen who left is listed on this page. Disgusting. Spread this far and wide — their names should be known and shamed.

Here’s the image from Issa:

You have to admit, Issa has been fighting for the truth even without support from the GOP establishment. He might not be perfect, but he deserves recognition for his work on getting to the truth about Benghazi.

Here’s the list of people who walked out:

Carolyn Maloney, NY Danny Davis, IL Eleanor Holmes Norton, DC Gerald E. Connolly, VA Jim Cooper, TN John Tierney, MA Mark Pocan, WI Matt Cartwright, PA Michelle Lujan Grisham, NM Peter Welch, VT Stephen Lynch, MA Steven Horsford, NV Tammy Duckworth, IL Tony Cardenas, CA William Lacy Clay, MO

HT to WZ and the Gateway Pundit.

Remember, last week John Kerry stopped the Benghazi survivors from being even questioned by congress.

Earlier, Obama even hid the survivors and had them change their names with threats towards their families.

The entire idea of the cover up is to defend Obama and Hillary so they can remain unscathed from their illegal plan to arm Syrians through Libya and their workings with radical Islamic groups.

Here are 6 facts that show how absurd Hillary’s handling of the entire situation was. It’s disgusting.

Spread this article far and wide on Facebook and Twitter — their names should be known and shamed.

Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won’t have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.

You won’t find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.

He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.

These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.

In 2006, the 54% of the population living in those 50 metro areas was responsible for 67% of armed killings nationwide. Those are disproportionate numbers especially when you consider that for the people living in most of those cities walking into a store and legally buying a gun is all but impossible.

Mayors of Obamerican cities blame guns because it’s easier than blaming people and now the President of Obamerica has turned to the same shameless tactic. The NRA counters that people kill people, but that’s exactly why Obamerican leaders would rather talk about the guns.

Chicago, the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers. Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of gang violence.

80% of Chicago’s murders are gang-related. But in 1999 when a bill came up in the Illinois State Senate to charge anyone carrying out a firearm attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have largely affected gang members, the future leader of Obamerica voted present. Had he not voted present, it is doubtful that he would have been reelected in an area where gang leaders wield a great deal of influence.

The majority of murders in the cities with the worst homicide rates are gang-related. And while it isn’t always possible to be certain whether a killing was gang-related, the majority of homicide victims in city after city have been found to have criminal records.

In 2010, there were 11,078 firearm homicides in the United States and over 2,000 known gang-related killings, over 90% of which are carried out with firearms. Since 1981, Los Angeles alone has had 16,000 gang related homicides. That’s more than twice the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is what Obamerica looks like. It’s a place where life is cheap and illegal guns are as available as illegal drugs. It’s the war that we aren’t talking about, because it’s easier to talk about the inanimate objects being used to fight that war.

There are, as John Edwards said, two Americas. America is a country that runs pretty well. And then there’s Obamerica. Not all of Obamerica is broken, but a lot of it is. America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem.

Democratic leaders and machines, combined with social workers and justice crusaders have run Obamerica into the ground. Obamerican cities used to be the homes of industry and progress. Now they’re places where young Black and Hispanic men kill each other in growing numbers.

America does not need gun control. It is a mostly law-abiding place. And gun control cannot help Obamerica. Not when its murder rate is driven by gangs who have no trouble obtaining anything; whether it’s legal in the United States or not.

This country does not need to have a conversation about how many bullets should go in a clip. It does need to have a conversation about how many parents should go in a family. It needs to talk about the ghettos of Obamerica and have a serious conversation about broken families and generational dependency.

Obama has become a role model to millions of people in the black community. If anyone can address these problems, it’s him. But instead of trying to solve the problems of Obamerica, instead of doing something about the high levels of unemployment, the broken families and the glamorization of drug dealing and violent crime, he wimped out and picked a fight with rural America.

AIDS prevention was sabotaged by the claim that the disease was a general problem spreading through the population. It wasn’t. Neither is gun violence.

Adam Lanza is as much of a poster boy for gun violence, as Ryan White was for AIDS. A better poster boy for gun violence might be Jay-Z, who boasts of having been a drug dealer and claims to have shot his brother at the age of 12. The drug dealer to millionaire rapper is the Horatio Alger story of Obamerica. And Jay-Z can be seen partying with Obama.

If Obama really wants to get serious about gun violence, then all he has to do is turn to the man standing next to him. But Obama, like every Chicago politician before him, don’t want to end the violence. The death toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.

That’s what Obama is doing now. Hiding behind Newtown and adorable little kids is the grim specter of Obamerica’s death toll. It’s buried inside the gruesome figures of how many Americans are shot each year issued as an indictment against the entire country in general and gun owners in particular. But those numbers are not an indictment of America. They are an indictment of Democratic mayors and liberal social policy. They are an indictment of Obama.

We need to set aside the same old tired social justice rhetoric and have a serious conversation about what is wrong with New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago. And we need to do it before it’s too late.