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Beware of job-killing ATMs

Beware of job-killing ATMs

Earlier this morning, I linked to this story making its way around the web: Did Barack Obama really blame ATMs for high unemployment?

"The other thing that happened though, this goes to the point you were just making, is 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," President Obama said about unemployment.  "If you see it when you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don't go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate."

Obama's message is clear: automated technology is costing us jobs.

You can't blame him, though -- he clearly inherited the presence of ATMs and kiosks from the Bush administration.

But coming from a president who recently came under fire for using an autopen to do his own job, I found his comments... interesting.

Not surprisingly, the whole Obama-ATM excuse has created a hilarious uproar over Twitter and I thought I'd share with you some of the best responses I've seen:

Archduke Ferdinand charged outrageous ATM fees in 1914, thus starting WWI.

"Let them eat ATMs."

"An ATM is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this ATM!"

"All that is necessary for the triumph of ATMs is that good men do nothing."

ATMs are legal in all 57 states

"You can have my ATM when you pull it from my cold, dead hands."

"First they came for the ATMs and I did nothing because I'm not an ATM..."

"We have nothing to fear, but ATMs themselves."

Mark Steyn has also weighed in on the ATM debate:

If you go to an ATM and tap in, say, $16.4 trillion and wait for the machine to disgorge it in $20 bills, you get an anonymous computer message saying, “Sorry. You have exceeded your limit. Better luck next time.”

But, if you go inside and talk to a compassionate human individual like head teller Ben Bernanke, he says, “Sure. You seem the kind of prudent responsible person whose credit is good for another couple trillion”, and then he hires members of the Amalgamated Union of Quantitive Easers to plant extra money trees out back.

That’s good for jobs and the environment and it stimulates demand for green-colored paper.

If you think about it, our problems really started when those mean-spirited cavemen invented fire and the wheel -- society has been going downhill ever since. So sad.

Exit question: Does this mean the Obama campaign will not be using robocalls in 2012?

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