Obama is facing ridicule today for his astoundingly tone-deaf implication that the proliferation of ATMs is partially to blame for America’s unacceptably high 20%+ un- and underemployment rate.
Blaming ATMs for unemployment demonstrates a short-sightedness that is beneath the President and belies his reputation among liberals as someone who is brilliant, intuitive, pragmatic, smart, and elegant in thought, word, and deed.
Instead, the ‘ATMs are to blame’ statement shows the President in a moment of profound economic unawareness on such a basic level that it is actually sad.
To the chagrin of the many Americans waiting for the President to put forth a bold jobs and economic growth plan, it also indicates that the nation’s chief executive seems to have given up thinking creatively on the economy:
"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."
It begs the question of whether or not the President is aware that the invention and dissemination of ATM technology is responsible for the creation of many other jobs that inevitably arise with the advent of technological advances like ATMs, kiosks, and other incredibly complex automated devices.
Those jobs – which the President momentarily forgot about – include logistics jobs, engineering jobs, service jobs, software jobs, manufacturing jobs, repair tech jobs, training jobs, integration jobs, transportation jobs, and other ancillary jobs for which the banking and air transport industries are responsible.
In many cases, those jobs are higher skilled and thus generate more pay and more economic activity than the relatively low skilled teller job which they replace.
Obama probably did not really mean to imply that the United States is in need more clerks than it is of highly skilled engineers, software developers and other high tech employees, but his alleged skills as the nation’s foremost political communicator failed him in this instance.
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