George Stephanopoulos Versus Reality
Plus, synagogue burns and New York Times invokes “Islamophobic events”
Decades after President Reagan’s tax cuts, the press’s refusal to accurately report on the reality of their impact is clouding the reaction to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Here is ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on the July 6 “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” show. Stephanopoulos is interviewing the chair of Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say this is all going to turbocharge growth. We have seen some experience with this back -- in Ronald Reagan's day, back in 1981. He had huge tax cuts. The growth didn't come, and they had to end up raising taxes for several years after that.
Concerned that could happen again?
Stephanopoulos’s claim, in relation to Reagan’s tax cuts, that “the growth didn’t come” is not accurate. Actually, real GDP growth for 1984 was an astonishingly strong 7.2 percent.
Yes, there was some additional tax legislation after the initial 1981 Reagan tax cut and yes that adjusted some rates upward, but even with the additional legislation, marginal rates overall ended up sharply below the Carter levels. The top marginal individual income tax rate was 70 percent in 1980 when Reagan took office and it was 28 percent in 1988 when he left office. The initial income tax rate reductions had an implementation that was phased in over time, so the growth took some time to kick in strongly. I guess you could argue about the causation and claim that the growth was the result not of the tax cuts but of the business cycle, or the Federal reserve cutting rates. But to claim in relation to the Reagan tax cuts that “the growth didn’t come” is just at odds with the reality of what happened in the 1980s. Robert Bartley wrote a book about it called “The Seven Fat Years,” which I recommend.
This isn’t merely an academic or historical point about the Reagan years. The reason it’s being talked about on the news now is not related to some Reagan retrospective or historical documentary. It’s related to the discussion of Trump’s tax cuts and whether they will have positive effects on economic growth. The Trump cuts are different from Reagan’s in that Reagan was cutting from, at 70 percent, a higher level to start with. There are also a lot of other provisions in Trump’s legislation on corporate taxes and individual taxes. Other, non-tax policies might also have effects on growth. Yet the false claim that growth did not follow after Reagan’s tax cuts is used as a bludgeon to attack Trump’s tax cuts.
ABC News agreed to a $16 million settlement with Trump (a $15 million settlement and $1 million in legal fees) in December 2024 over a false statement in a March 2024 “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” program, so you’d think the network and the anchorman would be on particular alert to take extra-special care when it comes to factual accuracy.
Anyway, there’s a lot of talk from critics and even from some fans of Trump about how Trump is a departure from the Reagan-era Republican Party. On this one, it really does seem in a lot of ways like a re-run. The Republicans think tax cuts will fuel economic growth. The Democrats and their allies in the press insist that is a fantasy. It looks like with the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill we will again have a chance to find out.
But the failure by Stephanopoulos to acknowledge the empirical reality of the Reagan record is almost enough to make a person despair of a nonpartisan accounting. It’s ironic, because Stephanopoulos became famous as part of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. That campaign included a promise of a middle-class tax cut and got traction against President George H.W. Bush, who had raised Reagan’s top rates and broken a read-my-lips promise. If 40 years from now some ABC News anchor is insisting that economic growth failed to materialize after Trump’s tax cuts, please remember to check the GDP data independently rather than taking the newsman’s word for it.
In the meantime, maybe Stephanopoulos and ABC News will run a correction this coming Sunday? No $16 million payment is needed, just a direct acknowledgement of the economic growth during the Reagan administration following the tax reductions.
On Islamophobia, Times Versus Times: A June 14, 2025 New York Times staff editorial, “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses,” included the passage: “University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia. Islamophobia, to be clear, is a real problem that deserves attention on its own. Yet antisemitism seems to be a rare type of bigotry that some intellectuals are uncomfortable rebuking without caveat. After the Sept. 11 attacks, they did not feel the need to rebuke both Islamophobia and antisemitism. Nor should they have. People should be able to denounce a growing form of hatred without ritually denouncing other forms.”
The news editors at the Times responsible for Victoria Kim’s July 5 dispatch from Sydney, Australia, might benefit from rereading the Times editorial. Kim’s news article was about an attack in which “a man poured flammable liquid on the front door of a synagogue in East Melbourne with about 20 people inside and set it aflame before fleeing the scene.” And also another attack in which an Israeli restaurant was attacked by a mob throwing furniture and glasses and chanting “death to the IDF.” The Times says “tables were overturned and objects were thrown at the restaurant, resulting in a broken window.”
The Times felt compelled in the news article to note that “Reports of Islamophobic events have also increased, including threats against a mosque and an Islamic school.”
The Times article also notes that “Early this year, federal and state governments enacted new laws restricting protesters’ rights.” This is a news article about an arson attack on a synagogue and property damage at a restaurant. What “protesters’ rights” have to do with it is not clear to this reader. Is the idea that before the laws were made stricter protesters had the “right” to set synagogues on fire? Or that, by unduly restricting peaceful protests, the new laws forced the mob to resort to violence? The laws created new or tougher penalties for “intentionally blocking a person from accessing or leaving places of worship without reasonable excuse, and for harassing, intimidating or threatening people accessing or leaving these places,” and for “displaying Nazi symbols on or near synagogues, Jewish schools and the Sydney Jewish Museum.” Defining this as “restricting protesters’ rights” is tendentious. What about expanding the rights of worshipers to go in and out of synagogues without being harassed?
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