Financial commentator and PragerU presenter Carol Roth told Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow that taxation is akin to holding American taxpayers “at gunpoint,” noting that the the U.S. government confiscates more money in taxes each year than the GDP of every country in the world other than the U.S. and China.
During a Thursday episode of The Alex Marlow Show podcast, Roth, a PragerU contributor who is known for her economic, business, and financial commentary, told Marlow that one of the things she loves about PragerU is that the organization “lets me take these big concepts and break them down in a way that even kids can understand.”
Roth recently presented a PragerU video titled “The Government Doesn’t Make Money—You Do” for the organization’s “5-Minute Videos” series which breaks down complex issues for viewers in a clear and concise format.
Watch Roth’s PragerU video below:
Marlow expressed his personal appreciation of PragerU’s videos because, despite “writing and reading constantly,” he said there are “still a lot of issues where I don’t have the basic 101 framework that you need. You can’t form an opinion or a strategy when you don’t know the fundamentals.”
“PragerU is really the only entity that’s trying to do that,” Marlow told Roth. “And you do that with this video, which is basically about how taxation is just confiscating wealth from the people who are productive members of society, and just gives it to the government.”
He praised Roth for pointing out the reality that people are taxed “at gunpoint, which means that you can’t get out of this or they will bring the heavy artillery to come get the money from you.”
Roth said she believes there is “a fundamental misunderstanding” about taxation that causes people not to realize that “the government doesn’t make money, it takes it by gunpoint.”
“So many people in the discourse — when they talk about the government and government spending — they make it seem like the government has done something, [that] they’ve made their own money and they’re going to spend their money, when it’s never their money, it’s our money,” Roth added.
“Even when they ‘print money out of nowhere,’ it’s still taking away your productivity,” Roth noted, adding that it is important for people to understand “what it means for the government to have funds, and the fact that no matter how much they spend, they’re always coming hat-in-hand like that crazy uncle that you give money to go away — and then they blow it and come back to you.”
“I feel like that’s a very good representation of the government today,” Roth said.
Marlow also praised the “great stats” Roth provided in her PragerU video, mentioning, “One of the stats in the video is that we confiscate from our citizens, every year, more than the GDP of every country other than the U.S. and China. I couldn’t believe this.”
“That’s just a wild number, and the fact that we spend more than that, how is that acceptable?” Marlow asked, to which Roth replied, “It’s completely unacceptable.”
Roth went on to say that when people hear “the government took from us $5 trillion” in so-called “revenue” that is derived from U.S. taxpayers’ productive earnings “and spent it,” it is “hard to understand what that even means without context because it is such a large number.”
“Other than the U.S. and China, it’s more than the entire output of every other country in the world, and we still cannot keep to a budget,” Roth said. “We in fact spend $2 trillion more than that, which as a percentage of our GDP, is equivalent to a wartime deficit to GDP.”
Comparing “these really big numbers” to “something that people can understand,” gives people “that context around the issue,” Roth continued, adding that understanding the reality of taxation “then gives you the foundation to be able to say okay what is it that we need to be doing here.”
The Alex Marlow Show, hosted by Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, is a weekday podcast produced by Breitbart News and Salem Podcast Network. You can subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Rumble, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
