RUSH: There’s a new reason for high unemployment as told by Obama. He had that interview with Ann Curry at the Today Show, and basically there’s too much automation out there. He cited ATM machines as a reason for high unemployment. No, no. I kid you not. That’s right! Obama explained to NBC News the reason that companies are not hiring is not because of his policies, it’s because the economy is so automated. He said, “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.”
He actually said this. How many of you are familiar with the term “Luddite”? You know what a Luddite is? L-u-d-d-i-t-e. A “Luddite” is basically used to describe somebody backwards, old-fashioned, out of it, worthless, and so forth and so on. Now, the Luddites were the people who, in the early 1800s, attacked the textile looms in England at the start of the Industrial Revolution. They wanted to destroy the looms because they said that they would take away jobs from the people. It’s a term of derision today, because they were so absurdly wrong. The loom added all kinds of work and productivity. It changed the textile business, as we all know. But Obama is now a Luddite! He is taking up the cause of the Luddites. The ATM machine, that’s why there’s high unemployment?
How long have we had ATM machines? Did Bush invent those, by the way? I don’t know. Did Bush invent the ATMs? ‘Cause everything’s Bush’s fault, according to Obama. By the way, ladies and gentlemen: “Twenty-eight months after Congress passed President Obama’s signature economic stimulus law, and nearly one year after he declared the summer of 2010,” last summer, “to be ‘Recovery Summer,’ 1.9 million fewer people are employed.” We have lost nearly two million jobs since Obama’s stimulus bill, and yet it’s Bush’s fault. “In February 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 141.7 million people were employed. By the end of May 2011 — the last month for which data are available — that number had fallen to 139.8 million, a difference of 1.9 million.”
We’ve lost two million jobs since the stimulus, and now today or yesterday we learned it’s because of “automation.” That’s what he told Ann Curry.
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