The wit and wisdom of Larry Kudlow

News that Larry Kudlow will become Trump’s top economic advisor reminded me of my experience with him when we were Left vs. Right guests on a WNYC-TV show in the early 1990s. WNYC’s studios were then in the Municipal Building in lower Manhattan. A producer met us in the lobby to take us upstairs, and proudly noted that the building had just been renovated. Larry’s response: “They should have just let it fall down.”

In an effort to democratize the form, WNYC had placed remote cameras in a few dwellings around the city, so citizens could ask questions and make comments to the guests. Larry had unsurprisingly spent much of the show mourning the passing of Reaganomics and prescribing it as the cure for all our ills. One of the remote questioners was a black man in East New York (a Brooklyn neighborhood that was then and still is one of the poorest in the city). He told Larry that they didn’t see any of that Reagan magic in his neighborhood. Larry dismissed his testimony, saying “the Reagan years were a Golden Age of black entrepreneurship.”

When it was all over and the cameras were turned off, Larry asked us “Where the hell is East New York?”