Chapter 3 is all about the US Tax Code, and right at the beginning he throws around the word ‘fascism’ when he notes that the IRS used to be called the “Bureau of Internal Revenue”. Because, y’know, income tax is fascist because it applies to 75% of Americans. On page 38, he then does an about-face and uses Russia as an example: according to Beck and his mysterious sources, after Russia went to a flat tax their income went up by 25%. The problem here is Beck is assuming that the flat tax is the only thing Russia was doing in terms of economic policy at the time, when they were actually enacting broad economic reform. The other problem is that studies have found that not only was the tax revenue increase mostly attributable to increased compliance, the compliance was itself due mostly to administration and enforcement policy changes, rather than tax rate changes. So basically, he’s full of shit.

Later on in the page, Beck uses some devious, devious math. He says that about 7.6 billion hours were spent on tax work, which for the sake of argument I’ll grant. But then he uses the scare figure of that being the equivalent of 3.8 million full-time employees to imply that the tax code is a huge burden. Now, let’s see here. Ignore for now the fact that richer people tend to have more complicated income structures and therefore spend the bulk of the time. According to CNN, in 2008, there were 156.3 million tax filers. That works out to a whopping 48 hours per person. And even then, this article notes that self-filers spent an average of eight to twenty-seven (shouldn’t the average be a single number?) hours on taxes. So that means that non-self-filers, who I’m guessing are the people who have complicated income structures, make up the bulk. Once again, he’s being deliberately dishonest with his math.

Then he rails on for a while about how the tax code is used to punish people, but he really doesn’t give any specific examples or ideas for tax reform, except that only a few people should pay the income tax I guess? He doesn’t say where the hell the government should get its money from, although I bet he doesn’t think it should get it at all. Small government and all that. And then he goes back to the founding father dicksucking, quoting George Washington and conjuring the image of the founders writing out the Constitution. He goes on and on about how we’re a republic, not a democracy, which is pretty goddamn hilarious given the populist rage he’s attempting to foment (take back the republic from the republic!). He inadvertently notes that to those who support SOCIALISM over capitalism, “having a cap on success is an appropriate price to pay for also having a cap on failure.” He actually doesn’t do anything to counter this point, which is pretty funny, because it’s entirely true. If you fail, you can basically lose everything, whereas success has the whole diminishing returns thing going for it. Are rich people necessarily happier than non-rich people? Maybe, but it’s not like Bill Gates is ten million times happier than I am. On the other hand, loss of wealth and failure suffers from no such effect; the guy who has nothing and struggles to eat every day is pretty much as miserable as you can get.

Next, Glenn Beck talks about the perks and privileges of the political class. Guess how many of them apply to executive CEOs? (hint: most of them!) But first, a special interlude about the 9/12 project and how fucking scary it is sometimes.