Chapter 3 is entitled “Money: The Opiate of the Masses”, and with a title like that you’d think he’d start out denouncing the importance of purchasing and spending in our modern society. But no. There is no mention whatsoever within this chapter of the spending habits of the individual America (save for an unintentionally accurate comparison near the end.) Instead, the entire chapter is a screed against government overspending. I do agree with him that the government spending more than its income is a bad idea, but he doesn’t even to consider the possibility of, gasp, raising taxes! Instead, he notes the huge amount of debt we owe and our massive interest payments on it, without giving any way to reduce these payments. And this chapter in particular is where a rather huge flaw of the entire book shines through: sourcing.

In any respectable book like this, you have to cite your sources. Glenn Beck certainly does so, although I can’t speak for whether the sources are accurate. But what he does not do, which makes the part of me that had to spend hours upon hours making sure my high school history papers were properly cited in Chicago format weep, is that he has zero footnotes or endnotes. Not only that, he doesn’t even give his reader the courtesy of sorting his sources by chapter; they’re all sorted alphabetically by last name. Granted, that is a legitimate way to organize your sources, but when you give the reader no way to link statements to sources, it really strikes me as a way to use sources to obfuscate the fact that you have no clue what the fuck you’re talking about. And that is especially important in a part that deals with numbers and specific data.

In one especially disingenious section, Beck notes that the 2008 profits of Exxon Mobil GE, Wal-Mart, and IBM total $87.61 billion. He then notes that even if these profits were to be taxed at 100%, then we wouldn’t even have enough additional income to match interest payments. Fair enough. But he seems to be forgetting that it’s also possible to tax the employees of these companies, especially the CEOs and the other high-ranking businesspeople! It’s not like net income is the only corporate-related earning source. He then notes that the sum total of all personal income tax revenue for the next decade would not be enough to pay down the national debt. Well… no shit? If you’re really, really deep in debt, you don’t try to pay it off all at once by starving yourself and your family. You pay off the interest on your debt plus as much as you can afford; as you pay off principal, your interest payments go down and your principal goes down even faster. And on this point, he’s just plain, flat-out wrong. According to official IRS data, the total income tax revenue as of 2007 was about $2.6T. Now, unless my math is off, I’m pretty sure that ten times that would be $26 trillion, which is just a small bit larger than the national debt. So I’m honestly not sure where the hell he’s getting his numbers, because he’s flat out fucking wrong. And once again, he’s completely ignoring the possibility of raising taxes. It’s not like it hasn’t been done before:

The rest of the chapter is fairly vanilla ‘Social security is a Ponzi scheme’ bullshit that others have debunked better than I; it’s not particularly interesting (although he calls politicians ‘lecherous’; I don’t think he knows quite what that word means!). He actually does note that if China were to massively hike interest rates, it would cause a global economical collapse that would make the current one pale in comparison. He even notes that this is “a logical case”; but he then dismisses it, saying… nothing. He just says that “logic is in even shorter supply among our leaders than intelligence.” Pray tell us, Glenn, what’s the flaw in this argument? He never answers. He draws a parallel between the US and Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic and says that we’re about to undergo hyperinflation, but….

Even during the great depression and other times of economic misfortune, inflation rates never went above 50%, and even then only for brief periods of time. This is hardly what I’d call ‘hyperinflation’. Granted, past performance isn’t an indicator of future behavior, but nowhere does Glenn credit anything for the idea that we’re about to experience hyperinflation. Once again, the lack of sources really causes this book to suffer. D-, see me after class Mr. Beck.

Coming up on Part 4: Glenn Beck takes on the US Tax Code. Here’s a preview: It’s too complicated, he misuses averages, and SOCIALISM!