Self-Fulfilled Prophecy

I just had some thoughts running through my head today; thoughts about the economic situation in which our country has entrenched itself through the mode of "self-fulfilling prophecy". Now, if I remember correctly, this country was never, by ACTUAL definition, in a "recession", much less a depression during Bush's presidency until the final quarter before he left office and when Obama got elected. The definition of recession I am going by here is the actual, formal definition used in economics, that is, a period of three consecutive quarters of falling real gross domestic product.

Anyway, I am pretty well convinced, and this of my own volition and decision after much study and deliberation, that we did not get into a recession until the people of this country were repeatedly told during Obama's entire campaign for presidency. (And this was by means of "scare tactics" from him and the blame-gamers who are now crying about the political right using the supposed same tactics to scare everyone about health care.) We were told so much, not only by Obama, buy by nearly all of the major media networks as well, that we were in "the worst economic times since the great depression". Now, we weren't even in a recession when he was making these asinine, ill-informed statements during his campaign. We didn't get into one until the final quarter of the year when he was elected. Now, I have known of, and known people who have been told, or told themselves something so many times that they started to truly believe what they were being told, even if it was nowhere near the truth. I have to argue that this in fact happened last year. Enough Americans were blinded by these lies, they somewhat fell victim to self-fulfilling prophecy. Americans became scared that there wouldn't be enough to pay the bills in the not too distant future, that they had to save every penny to survive "the worst economic times since the great depression". What happened then? People didn't spend, they didn't make big purchases. They stopped going out to eat as much. Then as a definite result, the economy suffered. There was no stimulation for the markets because commerce wasn't happening like it should. Americans put themselves into this mess, and then enough people decided to give up many of their freedoms by giving power of the presidency to one of the main men who put us in this situation by telling us over and over that we were in "the worst economic times since the great depression". We were never even close to that bad of a situation until Americans believed those lies.


***By the way, Mr Obama told NBC in July: “Doing nothing means that you’re going to lose what you have . . . Because on the current trajectory, your premiums are going to double again over the next five to 10 years.” (Is the right wing the only one using scare tactics? it seems to me he may be saying something to the effect, "it's my way or nothing")