Adam Carolla says deadbeat dads have cost society far more than serial killer Charles Manson.

The comedian and actor made the provocative claim in an extensive interview with The Daily Caller about politics, Hollywood and his new book, “President Me: The America That’s in My Head.” TheDC will be featuring segments from the interview over the next couple weeks.

“Charles Manson was responsible for the killing of seven or eight people. He didn’t do it himself; he just sort of unleashed his minions,” Carolla explained.

A “deadbeat dad,” Carolla continued, “may crap out a handful of kids with a handful of mamas, and you spread them out out there, and you start thinking about what that costs us as a society, and then the likelihood that those kids are going to get into trouble, get into gangs, possibly kill people. Parole officers. The whole mess. The money, the taxing on the system. Then the daughters perpetuating the same thing — not having a father, looking for love in all the wrong places, getting pregnant as teenagers.”

“You take that deadbeat dad and you go ahead and fan that out and really sort of look at the damage that a handful of deadbeat dads can do as far as society goes, and you’ve probably trumped Chuck – Charles – Manson in terms of what it costs society,” he concluded.

Asked whether there was anything the government could do to mitigate America’s deadbeat dad problem, Carolla said one thing America’s leaders could do is “[s]top elevating everything to hero status.”

“What the government can do is stop saying asinine things like when Obama said, ‘Anybody can be a dad, but it takes a hero to raise a child,’” Carolla explained. “Stop elevating everything to hero status. Hero? That’s like saying, ‘Everyone could eat at Denny’s, but it takes a hero to pay the bill.’ No, that’s your obligation.”

In a previous segment of TheDC’s interview Carolla, he explained how America could be fixed in one second.

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