Julie and I both noted President Obama’s revealing remark about ATMs. Demonstrating a lack of understanding of how businesses and innovation work, the president blamed ATMs for taking jobs from people. Speaker of the House poked fun at the president with a press release from the ATM, which says, “I didn’t do it.”
Hotair has a round-up of other responses, including one from the ATM industry. Jonah Goldberg also defends the maligned ATM. Jonah notes that ATMs have increased fluidity, efficiency, and consumer spending, leading to more branch banks and more jobs for tellers. The industry predicted that the number of teller jobs would rise by 6 percent from 2008 to 2018:
That estimate may be lower now because of the recession, but that’s the recession’s fault – i.e. in Obama’s political wheelhouse – and not because of the ‘structural’ issues Obama’s trying to pass the blame off to.
Jonah also quotes this:
At the dawn of the self-service banking age in 1985, for example, the United States had 60,000 automated teller machines and 485,000 bank tellers. In 2002, the United States had 352,000 ATMs – and 527,000 bank tellers.
He asks:
Guess who was president in 2002.
What should be clear to everybody is that a man who knows absolutely nothing about economics is running the country. ATMs create the best kinds of green jobs–you know, jobs that allow people to make some of that increasingly hard to come by green stuff.