In the past couple of months, we’ve heard Obama blame all that is wrong with the world on everything except himself. I’m not saying that he’s responsible for all that’s wrong in the world, but he deserves much of the blame for our current economic conditions. More specifically, the economy not rebounding and actually getting worse again (double dip?).
He’s previously blamed the high unemployment on ATMs and kiosks. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2009 there were approximately 154 million people in the work force, excluding the military. Let’s assume that bank tellers and manned kiosk workers were fired and they couldn’t get another job. We have to assume that this happened during the recession, because before the recession we didn’t have an unemployment problem. To affect the unemployment rate by one percentage point, 1.5 million workers would’ve had to have lost their jobs. Plus they couldn’t have found another job. Two percentage points would be over 3 million. Are we to seriously believe that what’s contributing to our unemployment rate was reducing the number of bank tellers and kiosk workers?
Perhaps Obama realizes this. I mean, it’s pretty absurd. For once he’s crunched the numbers and figured that that can’t be right. So he’s got a new scapegoat. Apparently the internet is now to blame for the unemployment rate. The internet. Something that’s been around for decades. Ok, fine. Let’s assume that the internet needed time to develop into the online shopping frenzy that it is now. It put people out of work because we, the people are no long going to stores outside of our homes. Wouldn’t this imply that online sites have been growing? If that’s true, wouldn’t you need a larger workforce to update and maintain these sites? How can this possibly contribute to unemployment? And how can a president who calls himself a Progressive claim that progress is causing unemployment? The truth is, Progressivism fundamentally brings us backwards. Think about. Universal healthcare takes you from a healthcare system where you have a choice of doctors and payment plans to one plan—the government’s. Most of their ideals are socialistic in nature and bring society back to a kind of feudalism.
But let’s go back to this idea that automation is contributing to unemployment. Fundamentally, this just doesn’t make sense. The automobile replaced the horse and buggy. The telephone eliminated the telegraph. Airplanes reduced the need for trains. Email replaced the need for the postal service. Were these progressions responsible for high unemployment rates and continuing recession? Of course not. If they were, we’d still be beating our rugs with a stick, washing our clothes on a rock in the river and hunting and growing our own food supply in a constant recessionary period.
The one thing that Obama doesn’t know is how automation actually increases the value of your dollar. For example: a retail company has 20 stores open and costs $1.5 million to operate. But because of online sales, they can close some of their underperforming stores and save $500 thousand. They can now offer better deals on their products, creating a more competitive environment. This stretches your dollar further as the consumer, even if this same retailer decides to expand their online workforce due to efficiencies.
This is just another example of how this President either doesn’t understand how and economy works, or he’s trying to destroy the one we have. There’s no other possibility. Not only does his reasoning to explain the high unemployment rate not make any sense, but it goes against his whole Progressive label.
In other news, Israel was attacked five times today. This has got to be the country with the most restraint. Even with this president, I think if we were attacked the way Israel is attacked, we’d be retaliating without much of a thought. But Israel restrains itself. Doesn’t Obama have a medal for restraint?
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