Morning Must-Read: Matt O’Brien: Now that the Dow Has Hit 18,000, Let Us Remember the Worst Op-Ed in History

…And the Dow isn’t even the best barometer of the stock market…. But if arbitrary round numbers are your thing, the Dow… above 18,000 for the first time. And that brings us to the worst op-ed in history. On March 6, 2009, former George W. Bush adviser Michael Boskin offered whatever the opposite of a prophecy is when he said that ‘Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.’… Boskin… didn’t think that this once-in-three-generations financial crisis was to blame for the market meltdown. Instead, he blamed it on Obama for… talking about raising taxes?

‘It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street,’ Boskin philosophized, ‘as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy.’ What followed was the usual conservative jeremiad against higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the poor, and deficit spending. Obama’s trying to turn us into Europe, and that’s why markets are pricing in the possibility of a Great Depression—not the dying economy he inherited. It was… extraordinarily ill-timed…. Obama’s radicalism has killed the Dow to the tune of a 171 percent return since Boskin’s op-ed.