Once again, Congress has blown past the end of the fiscal year without passing appropriations bills, thus setting up a government spending fight just before Christmas.
The defeated outgoing Democratic House majority is hoping some Hollywood-style flair will hide their true aim; namely, to stuff trillions of dollars in new spending down the throats of the American public.
There is, however, no need for such theatrics.
Congress can simply pass a short-term continuing resolution to extend current federal spending levels into early 2023. Extending funding levels into the new Congress would respect the voters and let the new House majority set spending levels.
As you’d imagine, the specter of a fiscally responsible Congress has alarmed the outgoing leftist majority. Since the election, Democrats have been feverishly trying to get their Christmas wish list omnibus spending bill passed and signed into law in the lame-duck session.
Never before has the outgoing defeated majority abused the lame-duck session to pass an omnibus bill. Shockingly, however, this time they seem to have an unlikely ally: Some of the Republican congressional leaders.
The Senate Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has backed the idea of a lame-duck omnibus, indicating that “the four corners”—a reference to leadership of both major parties in both chambers of Congress—have been working together on such a bill.
That would be an insult to the American people, who voted the old majority out of office and rejected their modus operandi of using the force of government to take hard-earned dollars from American workers and give them to their donors and favored political and crony corporate interests.
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Though many of the details of the proposed omnibus are murky, we know the deal includes yet another year of dramatic discretionary spending increases, despite dramatic hikes in spending over the past few years.
Since 2019, the annual level of discretionary spending has increased a whopping $384 billion. Discretionary spending has increased roughly twice as fast as the size of the economy in the past three years.
This, however, is only a fraction of what Congress has set in motion. Discretionary spending increases in one year ripple into much larger deficits over time. As such, this latest three-year binge will likely increase federal spending and deficits over the next decade by $4.9 trillion—$37,000 per household—with more than $620 billion of that in interest on the debt alone.
Even if a new omnibus slows the absurd rate of growth of nondefense discretionary spending, it won’t be enough to avoid fiscal catastrophe. A limited-growth omnibus would do nothing to mitigate the staggering recent increases in discretionary spending or their contribution to an interest-cost spiral.
At a time when most American families have struggled, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and a $7,400 inflation tax, Congress exacerbated their burdens by dramatically increasing spending. That has contributed to inflation and drained investment out of the hands of the private sector, further increasing consumer prices and stunting wages and economic growth.
Each dollar increase in the level of federal spending means an increased burden on the American public. These casual spending increases created pressure for the Fed to print trillions of dollars, devaluing your paycheck and savings, and raising prices at the pump and at grocery stores.
With the Fed now trying to rein in inflation, the massive volume of federal spending and deficits has led to crowding out, where the massive volume of government borrowing leaves less room for entrepreneurs to access lending markets to get the funding they need to grow.
That has slowed the building of new factories and businesses, and deepened the current recession.
What’s more, as funds dry up, it pushes interest rates sky-high. Over the past year, mortgage rates have more than doubled—meaning that, over the lifetime of a loan, a new mortgage on a median home will cost $300,000 more in interest than a similar mortgage just a year ago.
As Americans are being pummeled by the consequences of Congress’ reckless fiscal policy, Congress is planning yet another omnibus that increases discretionary spending.
Enough is enough. There is no need for such a careless and rushed omnibus. Conservatives in Congress could pass a short-term continuing resolution and carefully write new appropriations bills at the beginning of next year.
Conservatives should work to cut corrupt and wasteful programs to fund core constitutional responsibilities, such as national defense, and to actually reduce the deficit and lift fiscal and economic burdens off the backs of American families.
However, if Republican congressional leadership isn’t willing to do that and gives up its power, and instead works with Democrats to further the Democrats’ agenda, how would they be any different from the outgoing leftist majority, other than in name only?
Is this truly the reward the American people have earned for voting to flip control of the House?
Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.