writing a book about your time in the trump administration? larry: i don't have anything planned at the moment. i'm very busy, i'm loving life. never say never, but not at the moment, i don't. host: how may jobs do you have? -- how many jobs do you have? larry: there's a foxbusiness show every day, if i could plug that, 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. that's the bulk of what i do. i do a lot of different segments for ftm and fox news. i did one this morning on fox and friends. i do a radio show every saturday morning for three hours. a national radio show. that runs here on wabc radio. we are livestreamed and syndicated. and i also do -- i write op-ed pieces to much constantly. some informal political consulting with my friends on policy. pretty much anybody who asks. so i am a busy camper. i'm a grateful camper. life after the white house has been terrific. it's a real blessing. host: this is your second stint in the white house. the first being? larry: just a few years ago -- 40 years ago. a somewhat lower position. i was that economics deputy at the office of management and budget during the reagan administration. the director of omb was a fellow named david stockman who remains a friend of mine. that was my first job, in reagan's first term. host: your trip the 16 book connects the reagan revolution with jfk. what is the policy connection? larry: it's a story i've wanted to tell for years. it has been in the back of my head. i worked with my pal, a terrific researcher and co-author. in a nutshell, john f. kennedy was a progrowth democrat. he was a taxcutting democrat. he was a supply-side democrat. when he ran in 1960, he really ran as the growth guy and richard nixon ran as the status quo. in those days, the republican party was ok with very high tax rate. eisenhower had no interest in cutting that 91% tax rate they inherited from fdr's new deal. kennedy did not explicitly run on it but set i want 5% growth. i want low unemployment because there had been three recessions during the eisenhower years. that is a little-known factoid, but it is true, factually. the connection to reagan some 25 years later was reagan lowered marginal tax rates and helped reignite a more abundant economy. i would argue, as i do quite a bit on our show that the reagan tax cuts launched almost a three decade prosperity. the jfk tax cuts launched a decade-long prosperity, but unfortunately was unwound and undermined by lbj's great society. richard nixon, jerry ford, jimmy carter, none of them understood tax cuts, none of them understood the incentive effects, the economic growth effects of lower tax rates. maybe we can talk about that some more. some very smart people -- arthur laffer, who still around, my dearest friend and mentor. robert mondello, nobel prize, jack kemp and others, essentially they brought the kennedy tax cuts to reagan and ran on them. it was very controversial just as it was in jfk's day and reagan had two rounds of tax cuts. i was there for the first round and was involved in the campaign to promote. host: in 19 621, you quote jfk is saying it will be a major proponent of our tax reform program to broaden the tax base and reconsider the risk. larry: there are some really juicy jfk quotes that could have easily applied to reagan. kennedy was the first guy to use the phrase a rising tide lifts all boats. that phrase was used later by jack kemp, the late jack kemp, who is a very dear friend and mentor. i use it all the time. trump used it. the trump tax cuts, which were more on the corporate side, but were enormous tax cuts were cut from the same cloth as the reagan and jfk tax cuts. i was able to bridge reagan to trump on those policies. i was too young for jfk, just barely too young. i was only 17 when i went into the reagan white house. that's a joke. -- if i may come i want to go back because i'm reading a book, the title is the jazz age, but it is about warren g. harding, a much maligned u.s. president, way too far maligned. but in the 1920's, harding, his vice president, calvin coolidge and his treasury secretary andrew mellon, who was a great figure from pittsburgh and entrepreneurial banker, they put together a huge reduction in marginal tax rates. the income tax amendment was 1913. when woodrow wilson left office, it was over 70%. we went into a recession after world war i and those guys brought tax rates down to 25%. it launched a tremendous prosperity boom in the 1920's. i'm going to go one more. another of my favorite figures is ulysses s grant. he was arguably america's greatest generals -- they still teach some of his formations at west point. but grant come also as president, much maligned. my colleague at fox wrote a pretty good book about grant. but he did two things. economic things. he never gets credit. the liberal historians will never give him credit. but the fact is grant ended the civil war income tax. grant restored the greenback to gold. so we had massive wartime inflation and high wartime taxes and grant ended both and helped launch the second industrial revolution, which is sometime referred to disparagingly as the gilded age, but it was a phenomenal time in american life. just to be consistent, here is my guy grant, he's cutting taxes , harding, he's cutting taxes, kennedy is cutting taxes, reagan is cutting taxes, trump is cutting taxes. i was honored to serve under the last two. wish i would have been around for the others. host: in all of your books, and your work on foxbusiness, you talk about some economic turns and i was hoping we could have a broader discussion about how they all work together. tax reference, growth, the bond market, the stock market -- what's the interplay between all of these. here's a dissertation topic. larry: i would simply say the absolute basic key elements to economic growth and prosperity -- let me step back a moment. i am for growth, i am for prosperity. in my whole career, that has been my raison d'etre. i served in government -- the first job i ever had was at the federal reserve in new york, the federal reserve bank of new york. i served in open market operations and was a secretary to paul voelker, who is president at the new york fed. so i have had three government assignments. it seems to me if you do nothing else in government, you should promote policies that would generate growth, prosperity, jobs. that is our job. i am a free-market capitalist. i believe in free enterprise capitalism. i think it is the surest path to growth. when i was in the cnbc days and had my show there for many years, i use to open up the show every night by saying free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. i set it for many years. i believe that. i still believe that. coming back to your questions, essentially, you need the lowest possible tax rates, the least possible government intervention -- think of it as minimal regulations, and you need a sound currency, which i call king dollar. that was my phrase years ago. if you break that, if you move to a policy regime of high tax rates, excessive government intervention and regulation and a cheap dollar, a debased dollar, depreciated dollar, you will find yourself with high inflation, high unemployment and recession. i have argued down through the years that there are almost no exceptions to that. almost no exceptions to that. this is a controversial point. economics profession nowadays, which like everything else in the academy has moved way far to the left and doesn't agree with that, although i will say this modern monetary theory is taking a big licking with high inflation. i'm prepared to argue in historical terms as well as economic policy terms, that those are the essential ingredients -- lowest possible tax rates, minimal government regulation, and a sound, reliable king dollar. host: is the fed too powerful? is it necessary? larry: i won't argue the necessity part. although it is interesting. in the gilded age, j.p. morgan was his own fed and rescued the monetary system a couple of times. but is the fed too powerful? yes. right now, it is. the most troubling part of the fed to me is it has lost sight of its principal mission, which is to keep the currency sound and the price levels stable. nowadays, with all of this talk of woke culture and woke economics, the fed and some of its appointees talking more about climate change and price stability, diversity -- i'm not opposed to diversity, but i don't think that is the mission of the fed. the fed should manage its own human resources properly without any prejudices at all. but the fact that it wants to equalize the economy, that it takes this left-wing socialist view that we should all be equal at the finish line, when in fact, at a free society like ours, what we want is equal opportunity at the starting line and the finish line we will exercise our god-given talents in many different ways. i think the fed is way too much geared toward something called equity and climate change, which i'm not a climate denier, i'm just saying we do not have a climate emergency. we do not have an extensional climate risk. factually, even u.n. reports don't show this. this has become a political obsession, almost religion. i think the fed completely, utterly missed the boat on this inflation problem we are experiencing today and that last one is really unpopular. host: one of the other issues brought up in this genre is income inequality. is that a concern? should we be concerned person makes 10 times as much as person -- larry: we should not. the idea for me is we should, by law, have equality of opportunity at the starting line. absolutely by law. but we cannot guarantee equality of results. we cannot. even in communist countries, even in the old soviet union -- i grew up during the cold war and particularly in the reagan years, when we fought soviet communism, the only equality they had in the soviet union was equality of poverty, and the end the nomenclature who ran the place, they were the rich guys but there was no widespread prosperity ever, and that's true for all socialist or communist countries, it seems to me. we should not strive to end something called inequality. we should strive for growth and prosperity. we should maximize opportunities. we want to have unlimited opportunities. that is why i argue the government cannot manage the economy. the government cannot manage the price system. the government cannot manage markets. you have literally thousands and millions of people operating in a free economy and i want the economy to be free and i want them to have their own personal freedom. that's a job for the so-called private sector. free-market economics is the best path to prosperity. i want individual freedom inside the economy. freedom to fail and freedom to succeed. one of the great aspects of america, and it is still true to this day, you have an entrepreneurial story where people have an idea, they might scratch up some money to finance it, it may not work, it may fail , it may fail several times, you may go bankrupt, but at some point, you may get it right and you become a massive success. that is what is so brilliant about the gilded age, the industrial revolution, the information revolution. the stuff we routinely use today did not exist when i was in prep school or college or starting out. do you have a spare mimeograph machine in the truck? all of that is gone. we don't even hardly xerox anymore. you are running the show on an iphone and i love it. even an old guy like me, i've figured out most of the stuff. you've got kids dropping out of college, working in garages, trying to put things together, they fail, they fail and then succeed and hit it big. that's the american story, but behind that story is freedom. if we lose that, we will lose everything. i spent a lifetime trying to promote freedom, frankly in the economic sector where i know something about it but all throughout the country. freedom of speech, there's a big debate with misinformation, government bureaus, this stuff drives me crazy. i won't call him my friend, but elon musk, he calls himself a free speech absolutist -- i love that. free speech, freedom of religion, i want a free economy. a free economy will out produce every state run, centrally planned economy and i will sit here for a couple of hours all day and tomorrow and show you historical examples of why a free economy outperforms a state economy. host: before we get too far from jfk and the revolution, the fact about the recessions in the go get them 50's, what happened? was that government policy, just the waxing and waning? supply and demand? larry: there are a lot of factors after world war ii and after the korean war. but i would say principally, you had a 91% tax rate, very high taxes, which were very onerous. some critics of this view would say you had high taxes but you had loopholes and nobody paid it. you had some loopholes, some very famous loopholes. from hollywood studio owners and stuff like that. but most people, particularly the entrepreneurs had to pay very high income taxes. the more they earned, the more punitive the tax rate was. capital gains taxes were very high, corporate taxes were very high. the economy was smothered. the incentive effect which was so prominent during the harding, coolidge, mellon tax cuts, those incentives were not around. it was a tightly controlled economy, very government-run to economy, a highly regulated economy. the federal reserve properly, i think cap the dollar stable so you had episodes of inflation, but we were under the old bretton woods dollar-gold exchange system and the federal reserve did a pretty good job. but any time the fed tried to tighten, the economy had no other outlets because it was so tightly controlled by high taxes and regulations. those are really important issues. pike has many wonderful qualities, general eisenhower, president eisenhower. economics was not one of them. there's a long story. his top advisor was arthur burns . he advised nixon. push the ball down the road during the reagan years. he was ambassador to germany and a very good ambassador. he and i became very friendly and he became something of a mentor of mine. arthur creed -- i had a point about lower tax rates. he opposed it -- eisenhower, nixon -- he saw them work during the reagan years. there were three recessions and this is what gave kennedy a step up in the election. he ran as a growth guy and nixon did not deal with much economic, domestic policy. i remember nixon's son-in-law, a very dear personal friend of mine, his daughter and son-in-law are very dear friends of ours. i met nixon in the middle 80's. i was out of office, back on wall street. he had his old office down at one federal plaza, whatever it was in downtown new york those days. his son-in-law would bring in various policy people before president nixon would go on foreign trips. i had at least one visit, maybe two, and it was very charming -- but what i had written, numerous op-ed pieces criticizing his economics as president. he did everything wrong. raised taxes, had tariffs, took the dollar off the gold standard and we had booming inflation. the first time i met him, he comes in and looks at me and says you don't think much of my economics, do you? [laughter] and i said net -- i said, no sir, with respect, i don't. it was a very cool moment. this was the mid 80's. i had served in reagan's first term, but nixon acknowledged in his books that the reagan tax cuts worked. he acknowledge that because he was intellectually honest. host: insanity once more is a collection of your columns that came out in 2018. i want to read a quote from them -- this is election day 2016. enforcing trade deals is spot on . acting in the interest of american workers is correct. but large-scale tariffs are a terrible idea. larry: yes. and believe it or not, that is still my mantra. this is a good story. president trump was much more attuned to tariffs than i was or that i am. before i went into office, i became his nec director in march of 2018. he had just put through steel and aluminum tariffs. i did not agree and art die, i think steve moore may have been on that, but we wrote an op-ed piece criticizing this -- criticizing the steel and aluminum tariffs. president trump knew all about it. he read it when he was calling me secretly. the subject came up once or twice. we agreed to disagree. it is interesting. i'm not a fan of tariffs. tariffs are international taxes. they tax work and production just as much as direct -- as the mistake tax rates. so i regard myself as a free trader. but i'm going to make two qualifications on this. one is you do have two think about the issue of reciprocity. what's the other side doing to you on trade? this was an important point trump made. he and i, it is sort of interesting -- the only two op-ed pieces i wrote in his administration both preceded drew -- both preceded g7 meetings. in those, i quoted a conversation he and i had where he believed he was a free trader and under ideal circumstances, that is to say no tariffs, no non-tariff barriers, and no subsidies. that is the world trump yearned for. those were his goals and they are classic free-trade goal -- no tariffs, zero non--tariff barriers, and zero subsidies for favorite industries. i wrote that and quoted that. one op-ed was in the washington post, the second was in the wall street journal before a g7 and i remember, at the g7 we had in canada, which i think was 2018 in the north of quebec. we were in a bilateral with justin trudeau and president trump and your senior advisers lined up on both sides and they were talking about trade because trump was threatened to impose car tariffs on canada, which would have devastated canada. trump said you know, justin, if we had no tariffs and no nontariff barriers and no subsidies, we would all be in great shape as free traders. trump looks at me, i'm sitting one or two or three down from him. he said you've said that your whole career, 30 years. he knew that because we had talked about it. but, he expressed publicly that view and he did it later. so he had a lot of free-trade blood in him. his trade representative, a deer friend of mine and a brilliant guy, he was just on my tv show. we were in atlanta for an america first policy conference. people forget we had usmca, which was not perfect free-trade but it was a good free-trade deal. we had free-trade deals with japan, brazil, south korea, where both sides in the spirit of reciprocity gave up some protections. the biggest one was china and the most controversial one was china. trump had big tariffs on china. we still have them. 365 billion some odd. so far, biden has not taken them off and i hope he doesn't. i would argue, and as president trump argued, we needed those tariffs to bring china to the table, to get their attention. i will give you another view -- i completely agree. one of trump's greatest achievements as president was he rang the bell on china correctly. he made it very clear to people in this country and around the world that china is an adversary, they are not our friend, they are an economic adversary, they are a foreign policy adversary. so his rhetoric was tough, his tariffs were tough, but we did bring them to the table. no one had been able to do that. we got a bunch of concessions and i was on that china trade team and it was hard going. beijing and washington, beijing and washington. this was the so called one deal. the phase one free-trade deal was rooted in tariffs. if there is a certain inconsistency there, i understand the point, but the one was necessary to get to the other and i think the deal is holding up the good. it ain't perfect, lots and lots of progress on international -- on intellectual poverty theft. they bought a lot of our commodities, not perhaps as much as we want, but a lot, and we ought to be selling much mo