The United States has had mixed success in its modern economic policies, according to speakers at this week’s Center for Constructive Alternatives seminars.

The college hosted its second CCA of the academic year Nov 2-5, discussing U.S. economic policies since the 1960s.

Steven F. Hayward, author of “The Real Jimmy Carter,” spoke Sunday evening about the failed economic policy of Carter’s presidency.

“President Carter deservedly gets low marks for the performance of the economy during his one term in office,” Hayward said.

Hayward said Carter initially ran on a platform similar to Ronald Reagan’s in 1976, campaigning against the income tax and in favor of welfare reform.

When he became president, however, Hayward said Carter had trouble working with congressional Democrats, who wanted more liberal economic policies.

“He wanted tax reform,” Hayward said. “What he produced was a mess: higher taxes on people above median income. He proposed higher capital gains taxes. He suggested that maybe tax reforms should involve abolishing the mortgage interest protection for homeowners.”

Hayward said the stagflation of the 1970s put an end to Carter’s attempts to enact more conservative policies. Instead, Carter shifted from one policy to another every few months.

“Over the course of a single term, his administration had seven different economic programs,” Hayward said. “They shifted course many times, and they really didn’t explain the rationale of the policies very well.”

Former economic adviser to President Donald Trump, Stephen Moore spoke Monday afternoon about how the Trump administration took inspiration from the economic policies of the Reagan administration.

Arthur Laffer, one of Reagan’s economic advisers, was a proponent of a policy known as the “Laffer curve.”

“The Laffer curve is a very simple proposition,” Moore said. “When you tax something, you get less of it, and when you tax something less, you get more of it.”

Moore said the concept of cutting taxes to increase revenue existed before Reagan, citing Calvin Coolidge’s increasing revenues by reducing the top tax rate from 73% to 25%. 

Moore said Reagan’s policies helped the economy rebound after the 1970s.

“Reagan did two things that were absolutely critical to turning around the economy,” Moore said. “Number one was sweating inflation out of the system. The second thing he did was cut tax rates, and he cut them significantly.”

Moore said Reagan initially cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% and later to 28%, increasing revenues both times.

Under Trump, tax rates are causing people to move to states with no state income tax such as Florida and Texas, and are leaving high-tax states like California and New York, according to Moore.

“People are voting with their feet against liberal progressive policies,” Moore said.

Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation spoke Monday night about the destruction that the globalist policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations caused in the economy.

“The result of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and most favored nation status for China has been for Americans the loss of millions of jobs, the destruction of communities, and the accumulation of trillions of dollars of trade deficits,” Roberts said.

Pro-globalist economists failed to see the consequences of other countries not following suit with the U.S.’s move toward free trade, according to Roberts.

“They bought into the ivory tower theories of economists bought off by globalizing corporations that argued that lowering barriers to trade would ultimately be beneficial to everyday Americans,” Roberts said. “Even if our trading partners locked us out of their markets and treated American companies unfairly.”

Roberts expressed optimism as younger generations move away from globalism in the age of Trump.

“Globalism is not our destiny,” Roberts said. “It is the byproduct of a decadent generation, and we need to remain on our guard against it.”

James Rickards, editor of the “Strategic Intelligence” magazine, spoke Tuesday night on “MAGA Economics.”

“Maganomics and the economic policy of the Trump administration is very well-organized and very well-thought out,” Rickards said. “That is not the narrative you’ll hear from the mainstream media.”

Rickards said the general outline of the Trump economic plan is to have a deficit of less than 3% of annual Gross Domestic Product, more than 3% of real growth, and to produce three million barrels of oil per day.

According to Rickards, the amount of the national debt is not as important as its ratio to the national GDP.

“If you get your economy growing faster than your debt, then the ratio will come down and we’ll be in a very good place,” Rickards said. “We have done it before and we can do it again.”

The series concluded with a faculty roundtable Wednesday afternoon.

Professor of Politics Kevin Portteus spoke favorably of Trump’s economic policy, but said one must see that economic policy is interconnected.

“We can’t view economic policy in a vacuum,” Portteus said. “If we deploy tariffs and then allow replacement migration, we haven’t solved anything. On the other hand, it’s pointless to deploy tariffs and then tax and regulate ourselves into oblivion. We also ought to notice that whatever the specific rates were, America became the greatest economic powerhouse in human history under a comprehensive system of tariff protectionism.”