I bought a few magazines to read on the plane recently. I read them cover to cover. I bet 2/5 of the articles start with a sentence like “In these hard economic times…” or “With the current state of our economy…”. And 3/5 of them use a sentence like that somewhere in it. Even when the article has little or nothing to do with the economy. It’s just a hack sentence used to grab attention.
You repeat something enough times, it really sinks into peoples heads, and ultimately affects their behavior. I wonder how much of this recession was caused by panic-induced behavior instead of real economic swings.
Atleast once a day I jokingly say “Who can afford to in this economy.”
By the way the Box Model article on CSS Tricks was very helpful.