"Worst Op-Ed In History"

Reflecting on the Dow Jones going over 18,000 yesterday, Matt O'Brien offers us "the worst op-ed in history:"

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." Now let's set the scene. Obama had been in office for less than two months at that point, and in that time, stocks had admittedly fallen a lot as markets worried that the big bank bailout known as TARP wouldn't actually be enough to save the banks. It got so bad that Citigroup briefly became a penny stock.

Boskin, though, 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. 

To illustrate how completely boneheaded this reactionary's "free market conservative's" prediction was, here's O'Brien's visual (click on image to enlarge):

With the usual caveat that Wall Street's gains don't reflect Main Street's pains and wage growth continues to disappoint, the news that the Gross Domestic Product grew by an impressive 5 percent in the third quarter and Obamacare is (barring malicious judicial activism from the Supreme Court) alive and very well, are positive signs.  So, no doubt Boskin and fellow reactionaries "free market conservatives" are still demanding to know, "When are you going to stop killing the economy, Obama?"