An informal, stochastically-selected poll of academic economists conducted by the Economist, has yielded somewhat surprising results, with more than 70% of respondents labelling Bush’s first-term economic policies as “bad” or “very bad”, and nearly 60% disapproving of his economic agenda for a second term. 27% disapproved of Kerry’s proposed overall agenda.

The primary source of economists’ discontent with Bush is the centerpiece of his economic policy–tax cuts, with more than 70% of those polled describing Bush’s tax cuts as “bad” or “very bad”, based on concerns about America’s fiscal health and the pressures the eventual retirement of our parents’ generation will place on the infrastructure of the federal government.

Those polled also preferred Kerry’s health care plan to Bush’s by a significant margin.

Bush did better than Kerry on trade: 60% regard Kerry’s plan as a bad idea, based largely on many economists’ opinions that concerns over outsourcing are inflated and outsourcing does not pose a significant threat to the American economy. There are compelling reasons for agreeing with that opinion, but given that there are many Americans with strongly negative opinions about jobs moving overseas, it’s unlikely that we’ll see either campaign deny the importance of the outsourcing issue.

For the sake of even-handedness, here’s a story on ASU economics professor Edward Prescott, 2004 Nobel Laureate, who thinks that “[w]hat Bush has done has been not very big, it’s pretty small… Tax rates were not cut enough.”