Noted economic genius Barack Obam blames ATMs for job losses
This argument that technology costs jobs is so old and outdated, they used to make Twilight Zone episodes about it.
“There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
Or you try to start a business but get buried in government bureaucracy and mandates instead. Or you currently run a business but the government bigfoots you with a permitorium banning what you do, or regulates you from one level of staffing to another. Or a federal agency decides to step in and stop a corporation from building a new assembly plant for political reasons, and because that agency thinks it can get away with it. Wait. The president didn’t bring any of that up.
All this prompts Stacy McCain to ask a simple question or two:
The recession is not equally bad everywhere. Why is unemployment nearly 12% in California but less than 6% in Oklahoma? Don’t people in Oklahoma use ATMs and automated airline ticket kiosks?
Go get some economics training, Mr. President. Or just ask any company exec who has chosen to move his or her company out of one state and into another, why they made that move. Start with Boeing and that plant in South Carolina that your NLRB is stomping on. You might learn a thing or two.
More: And another thing to echo McCain’s questions — Why has one state out of the fifty been the scene of 37% of all national job creation over the last decade? Did that state kick out all the ATM’s, or do its economic policies have something to do with businesses hiring there?
Well, I have thought for quite a while now that the whole blame would be placed by this current group on …refrigerators.
This administration and its assorted nutjobs has the look, feel and aura of The Iceman Cometh.
The fact that Obama has gone full Ted Kaczynski on us is not all that surprising. The manifesto of green jobs, global warming hoaxes and redistribution is not that long of a leap ….from Unabomber to Unilateralbomber.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster
for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of
those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have
destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological
suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have
inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued
development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly
subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage
on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social
disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased
physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
Just how far a trip is it from “clean and articulate” to disheveled and rambling?
How far a trip is it from socialist to anarchist?
Refrigerators killed off the Iceman. He cometh back with a vengeance.
The One and his entire administration are to quote a PJ commenter:
A glittering jewel of colossal ignorance.
I can’t take much more, I can’t even view the vid of him saying this, let alone Wasserman.
Dark Times ahead indeed from David Solway’s recent PJ article
The impairment of literate thought has been slowly and inexorably tunneling through the culture since the John Dewey-inspired, child-centered, “progressivist” movement in education of the 1920s. Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) was a manual for the precocious subversion of the mind. Western education then received a resonating shock from the intellectual anarchy that erupted in the 1960s and it has been atrophying ever since, as is glaringly obvious not only in the performance of our students but in the mental emaciation of our politicians, journalists, academics, and public intellectuals. These are people many of whom, with only a few welcome exceptions, can no longer think straight, some of whom cannot formulate a coherent sentence, and others of whom are reduced to relative helplessness without external devices to shepherd them through a political speech.
Even those who are capable of a certain rhetorical flow tend to trade in the most rudimentary concepts or indulge in binges of fantasy thinking, as if they were still children, though occupying seats of authority or influence. (The malady is not only native to segments of America; as noted author Bruce Bawer writes of his “illiberal, menacing, infantilizing” expatriate residence, “I’ve lived in Norway so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live as an adult.”) It is the graduates of the Sixties and their epigones who are now “in charge.” Their condition of arrested development explains their failure to understand the underlying complexities of world affairs. It accounts for their inability to disinter the historical substratum on which momentous events are predicated, the puerility of their analytical assessments, and the catastrophic political decisions they regularly make. We have truly fallen on dark times.
Or you support unions and taxes that make it cheaper to manufacture things overseas and ship it back.
Or you support illegal immigrants who suck emergency rooms, food stamps and schools dry while sending their non-taxable income to Texjdpoosldcoddpotl.
Or your wife spends 75 grand a day living it up in Spain at who’s expense?
Or you throw millions of dollars at an education system based on the idea that you have to outspend the racism of white folks.
Or you make it so expensive to start up a restaurant that if one is that rich one doesn’t need a restaurant in the first place while letting illegal aliens set up a shanty shack selling tacos with no regulation or oversight.
A nice tie in, possibly Charles ought to be contributing to PJM
http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/the-economist-obama-an-economic-illiterate-not-a-socialist/
America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.— Ayn Rand
“You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller”
Uh, I hate to break it to you, Mr. President, but this has been the case for over 30 years! I remember my parents using early ATMs with the rotating drums serving the cash in the late ’70s. This did not suddenly become a “structural” employment issue in 2007. Not only is this a transparent excuse for policy failure, it doesn’t even minimally pass the Ha!-Ha! test.
I think he just assumed everyone go their cash in unmarked envelopes under the table at union meetings…..
It was inevitable– http://j.mp/lFZvtC