Obama newest job plan: Ban ATMs, airport kiosks, farm tractors, PCs

by Harry Barry
Skinnyreporter.com

Obama said a ban on diesel tractors could result in 16 million new jobs as well as reduce global warming by preventing emissions of greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels.

"Before we stupidly allowed farmers to use tractors, most of America worked on farms," he said. "Now a single tractor in one day can plow up a field that used to take a small army of workers a week to dig up by hand. A tractor ban could provide enough employment not only for my friends who lack immigration papers but also for American citizens who would rather work with a shovel than collect unemployment."

The author of Obama's new jobs bill, White House Deputy Economist Owen D. Munny, has calculated that personal computers in homes and offices have destroyed about 30 million jobs.

"Before the PC epidemic," he said, "businesses had to hire offices chuck full of clerks and secretaries. Now a single secretary can do the work that used to take a dozen hard-working office workers to achieve. We must eliminate those PCs so that businesses will be forced to hire more people."

U.S. Postmaster Dee Rayne Judd said personal computers employing email have eliminated the need for millions of postal workers, hundreds of whom are now paid to sit in empty rooms doing nothing.

"Without the unfair competition created by emails," he said, "the Postal Service could charge more for stamps and hire millions of new delivery workers."

The elimination of airport kiosks would result in the immediate hiring of 700,000 airline agents, according to airline labor spokesman Beau Winge of the Society of Transportation Unions Combating Kiosks (STUCK).

"Kiosks work way too fast and take away jobs from thousands of people who would rather work than sit home and watch TV," he said.

Obama's newest czar, Technology Elimination Advisor Rowell Erskeight, said today that he is beginning a wide-ranging analysis of high-tech machines that have been stealing American jobs.

"We're looking at everything from automobiles to rollerskates, copy machines to typewriters," he said. "We even have agents in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, looking at how many jobs have been lost to computerized blackjack and poker machines. Our preliminary analysis is that melting down those machines could result in the hiring of almost 100,000 card dealers overnight."

Erskeight said he has hired one of the world's most celebrated historians, Uganda University history scholar Idi Ott, to study the results of past technology reduction efforts.

Ott said a shining example of technology reduction is the southeastern Asian country of Cambodia, where a high-tech machine ban created almost 11 million jobs in the late 1970s.

"The Cambodian government wisely compelled citizens to desist from using overly efficient high-tech machines," he said. "That included telephones, automobiles, televisions, radios and almost everything else that requires precious energy resources while simultaneously destroying jobs. The government's tractor ban alone resulted in the creation of 5 million jobs. Unfortunately, not everybody wanted to work hard, and so the government was forced to reduce the labor force by about 3 million."

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." — Elbert Hubbard

Links of the Day

• ATM industry defends itself against Obama
• Productivity is not the enemy