Reading through the text of President Bush's State of the Union speech the morning after, it occurred to us that to get real information about the state of our union the last source one should look to is this annual address. The State of the Union has become a dis-infomercial, an overstuffed grab bag of empty promises, focus-group phrases and presidential pomposity.

When it came to the president's economic policy, his speech certainly struck some familiar notes: more tax cuts, more jobs, cut the budget deficit in half by 2009. But more is going on behind the presidential doublespeak, and so we asked economic guru Doug Henwood to elucidate Bushonomics and what it has wrought. Henwood edits the Left Business Observer and hosts a weekly radio show on economics for New York's Pacifica Radio affiliate WBAI. His latest book is After the New Economy, from the New Press.

In his address, Bush said that "Americans should not fear our economic future, because we intend to shape it." As Henwood suggests, that's precisely what we should fear. Bush and his ilk are shaping our economic future, and not for the better.

eorge W. Bush is our first president with an MBA, and it shows. He's delivered an economy that's been a CEO's dream: profits are way up, and taxes, at least on CEOs, are way down. Sadly, though, employment and average incomes haven't done nearly as well. Of course that's not what Bush would have you believe. In the White House version of things, growth is strong, jobs are being generated, everything is operating with a full head of steam. But by most conventional measures, especially job growth, the Bush years have been the worst of any president in the last fifty years.

In sharp contrast with his predecessor, Bill Clinton, Bush hasn't paid much attention to economic policy—he'd much rather mount an invasion or tap our phone calls. The quality of his economic appointments has been dismal, and not just for their politics. One of the exceptions, the conservative but intelligent economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, was fired early on for suggesting that the war in Iraq could cost as much as $200 billion. As it turns out, his estimate was too low, but it was not on message for 2002. Bush's Treasury Secretaries, Paul O'Neill and now John Snow, have been barely visible, and seem way out of their depth. In the weeks after Bush's re-election, anonymous administration officials suggested in the papers that Snow would be sacked come January 2005; but it's said that they couldn't find a plausible replacement, so he was kept on. According to press reports, serious people rejected job offers for one opening or another because they didn't want to be used as mere salespeople for policies that would be chosen by Bush's inner circle.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Bush economic policy has consisted of cutting taxes on the rich and giving natural resource companies free rein to despoil the environment. Much of it feels like a re-run of the Reagan years. Then, as now, easing the burden on business and the rich was supposed to unleash a wave of innovation and investment, and ultimately millions of new jobs and higher incomes were to have been the outcome for all of us. It hasn't worked out that way.

AXING TAXES—Both the administration and its critics would agree that the centerpiece of Bush's economic policies have been a series of large cuts in the personal income tax, which have greatly shrunk federal revenues. From time to time, Republican apologists will deny that the tax cuts had anything to do with the growth of the federal deficit, but that's nonsense.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), hardly a partisan Democratic redoubt, computes so-called "standardized" measures of federal revenues and outlays. These are designed to separate out short-term effects and various technical issues and focus on longer-term changes in tax and spending policy. According to the CBO's estimates, standardized federal revenues fell from 19.3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000 to a low of 16.1 percent in 2003; they've since recovered a bit, to a projected 17.0 percent in 2005. Since U.S. GDP (the total value of goods and services produced within our national borders) is around $13 trillion, that shift of 2.3 percentage points means that Washington is taking in almost $300 billion a year less than it would have had the tax cuts not happened.