Issues as complex as international trade policy, health care, premiums and income inequality are often intimidating and inaccessible to people outside the policy establishment.

The final installment of the Challenges for the Next President Series provided a basic overview of the nation’s most pressing economic issues in an accessible, welcoming and non-threatening environment.

The panel consisted of three Calvin economics professors: Adel Abadeer, Scott Vander Linde and Evert Van Der Heide.

Economic issues are surrounded by partisan talking points and unclear information in the news so the panel focused on re-education; they focused on dispelling misunderstandings, and inaccuracies in the prevailing wisdom.

Van Der Heide opened the discussion by outlining a few general questions and points of disagreement that often fuel economic discussions. These fault lines had to do with the role of government in the economy, which Van Der Heide argued should be a guiding role:

“We think of government as trying stabilize the economy, in 1946 we had the Full Employment Act, which mandated the government stabilize prices and maximize employment levels in the economy, so unemployment and inflation and economic growth are the big three.”

Then, health care went under the microscope. The Republican mantra is that Obamacare raised health care costs for everyone, forced people to switch doctors and increased patient waiting times. They argue that the government has no place in health care, and that the invisible hand of the market should secure affordable health coverage for all Americans.

Vander Linde made the case that because roughly 8.5 percent of the money spent in the economy is government health care expenditures, and that total healthcare spending is projected to be 20 percent of the economy in 2020, the government is right to have an active interest in healthcare, in order to correctly allocate taxpayer funds.

This one sided debate on the success of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) coming from the right is incorrect, Vander Linde says. Since the introduction of the ACA, which is only a small part of the entire American healthcare system, the number of uninsured people has been cut nearly in half:

“This is because the Affordable Care Act expanded the Medicaid program in the states that chose to expand … and we also have the insurances exchanges … that have given people who were individually facing the insurance market, who are maybe having some difficulties, they’re allowed opportunities on these exchanges.”

The second major topic was international trade. The prevailing wisdom, which has increased in quantity during this election cycle thanks to the issues elevation in the debates, is that international trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) hurt the United States by importing cheaper goods from Mexico, and incentivizing U.S. companies to shift production and production jobs, abroad.

Abadeer debunked this theory and talked about the finer details of trade policy. Currently, the United States has a $54 billion trade deficit with Mexico, which means that the United States buys $54 billion worth of goods services more from Mexico than we sell to them. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the trade deficit the United States has with China, which is six times larger.

The isolated solution would be to cancel our free-trade agreement with Mexico and impose a tariff, a tax on foreign goods, on imports from Mexico. Unfortunately, there would be ripple effects.

“If we’re going to impose a tariff on Mexico, the factor of production will go from Mexico to China, so we’re going to end up in more debt with China,” Abadeer warned.

He also connected free trade to immigration stating that, “When we produce with Mexico, it increases their GDP… so it has a good effect on Mexico, and that has a net effect on reducing the flow of immigrants from Mexico to America …” One of most often cited reasons for illegal immigration is a desire for greater economic opportunity, so an increase in trade might be an unlikely solution.

This event and the writing of this article occurred before the election of Donald Trump.