CNBC senior commentator Larry Kudlow told an audience of more than 500 financial professionals that he loves "the Holy Father, [but] I don't agree with him on [almost anything]."
 
Speaking at the sixth annual Inside Alternatives conference in Denver this morning, Kudlow says the most important challenge the U.S. and the global economies face is achieving higher rates of growth. He believes the current debate over whether the world is mired is "secular stagnation," a phrase coined by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, is misplaced. "It's an argument to cover up six years of top-heavy government policies," he said.
 
Kudlow is currently working on a book about the Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s, which went into effect after JFK's assasination, and he punctured a myth about the 1950's economy under President Eisenhower, which many on the left have characterized nostalgically as the best America ever did, despite 90 percent top marginal tax rates.
 
The facts are quite different with popular perception. The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent rate during the Eisenhower years, while experiencing three recessions, including one quarter in 1958 that saw GDP drop by more than 12 percent.
 
In contrast, GDP grew nearly 5 percent after Kennedy's tax cuts and 4.7 percent from 1982-1990 during the Reagan years. "We are capable of growing at 4 percent or 5 percent" for a sustained period of time, he said.
 
"When Jeb Bush comes out with a 4 percent growth target and is ridiculed, the ridiculers are wrong," Kudlow said. "I still believe a rising tide lifts all boats and that people want to work more. There are 6.5 million people working part-time who want to work full-time. At the peak of the last cycle, that figure was 4.5 million.
 
"Two percent growth is fine for Europe and it's a good day in Japan," Kudlow continued. "Greece and Connecticut will never see it again." GOP officials in Connecticut have recently encouraged Kudlow to challenge one of its two Democratic senators.
 
Speaking of Greece, Kudlow cited it as a perfect example of the failure of socialism. "President Obama is not a socialist; he's a liberal, left-wing redistributionist," he explained, adding that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was a true socialist. "Greece is socialism, the government owns everything."
 
Following inane prescriptions from the European Central Bank and the IMF, Greece, already starving and broke, raised taxes and cut spending. What happened? GDP fell 25 percent.
 
After first mentioning that he was a non-violent man, Kudlow said he thought the IMF should be expunged, though his description of expungement was less diplomatic.
 
There are "fabulous Greek businessmen and women" all over the world who would love to return to the motherland and help invest there and rebuild it. Were the Greek diaspora able to return home and help privatize government-owned businesses, the nation could recover.
 
Kudlow had another suggestion as well. "Let Donald Trump go there and do it and build golf courses, hotels and casinos [on their beautiful uninhabited islands] and get the hell out of the presidential race," he quipped.
 
Kudlow admitted he loved debt, though it needed to be used correctly. When FDR borrowed 140 percent of GDP to defeat the Nazis, it "was a great  investment." That may be, but 90% marginal tax rates, which fewer than 1,000 Americans paid in the 1950s, were not the only reason the economy grew so slowly in that decade. Paying off the debt from World War II was a major contributor to slow growth.
 
Ditto for Reagan, who "didn't care about the deficit. He was borrowing to invest in a business called U.S.A." The debt boom of the 1980s also financed a huge defense build-up that "turned around the Cold War."
 
Since the 1930s, the decade when federal debt stood at the lowest percentage of GDP was the 1970s, when it was 25 percent. Kudlow recalled those years as "one hell of a s----y decade."
 
Kudlow was less impressed with federal borrowing to finance consumption, or social policies such as Obamacare, which he termed "the great regulatory straight jacket of our time. Not all of it is bad, but the mandates are bad.
 
"Don't force me to buy lactation services," he said. "The president, in the name of doing good, has gone to excess. I don't question his motives." But the results are that businesses and consumers are afraid to spend.
 
Kudlow was also unimpressed with corporate CEOs who are blaming weak earnings on the strong U.S. dollar. "Only seven-figure economists on Wall Street will tell you a strong dollar and weak earnings are a bad thing." It's a phony issue and CEOs need to suck it up and build it into their business models.