(Daily Caller)—Prices across the economy have skyrocketed since President Joe Biden first took office, hurting Americans in certain sectors more than others due to inflation and regulations, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Since January 2021, when Biden first took office, the consumer price index (CPI), a measure of inflation, has risen 17.1%, ending in October, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). Cost increases due to inflation and regulations are hitting every area of the economy, with housing, health care, appliances and car loans experiencing particularly significant impacts, according to experts who spoke with the DCNF.
“I would say that the effect on mortgage rates has been the thing most affected,” Michael Faulkender, chief economist and senior advisor for the Center for American Prosperity, told the DCNF. “Because of 40-year-high inflation from excessive government spending, the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates. When Joe Biden took office, the average 30-year mortgage rate was 2.77%. Today, it is 7.22%.”
Overall inflation reached a recent peak of 9.1% in June 2022 and has since decelerated to 3.2% in October year-over-year, still far above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. In response to the high inflation, the Fed raised its federal funds rate to a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, the highest rate in 22 years, placing upward pressure on credit conditions.
The costs to pay for housing expressed in the CPI for shelter, which more closely follows the cost of rent, have risen 17.5% since Biden took office, slightly higher than general price increases, according to FRED.
Many economists point to high government spending under the Biden administration as one of the key causes of elevated inflation. Biden signed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021 and approved the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which added $1.9 trillion and $750 billion in new spending, respectively.
“To put that number in perspective, at 2.77%, a $250k mortgage would have a monthly principal and interest payment of approximately $1,023 per month,” Faulkender told the DCNF. “At 7.22%, that same $250k loan has a payment of $1700 per month. That is why pending home sales have hit their lowest level in two decades. If one looks at rental costs, they have been one of the largest contributors to the ongoing inflation people are facing and it is usually the largest component of a household’s budget.”
In August 2023, a family with a median income could only afford a 30-year mortgage on a $356,272 home following interest rate and price increases, while that same family could afford a mortgage on a $737,392 house in December 2020.
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“When some goods are hurt worse than others, the causes are not inflation,” Ryan Young, senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “Higher-than-inflation housing and health care costs are due to regulations and supply chain problems — or at least the higher-than-inflation parts are.”
Health care costs are being ratcheted up due to rising premiums, which increased 7% just this year as of October, increasing 22% over the last five years. In an effort to bring down prices, the Biden administration announced in August that it would be forcing negotiations on ten major drugs.
The Biden administration has outpaced the previous three administrations in terms of issuing significant regulations, calculated by those that have at least a $100 million economic impact, completing 89 by the end of 2022. The total added costs due to regulations on the economy are estimated to be $1.939 trillion.
Biden has made combating climate change a key part of his policy objectives, instituting and proposing a slew of environmental regulations that, if all approved, would ultimately add $9,166 in new costs for average Americans per home. Many of the regulations are targeted at ordinary household items like appliances, particularly gas furnaces, water heaters, air conditioners and more, in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions.
“The Fed is now keeping the money supply stable, which is why inflation is now under 4% instead of above 9%,” Young told the DCNF. “Raising interest rates has been part of that. The trouble is that has also raised rates on mortgages, car loans, small business loans and eaten away at people’s retirement savings and college funds. The trouble with inflation is that it hits everything.”
The average monthly payment for a car loan has increased from $617 in the third quarter of 2021 to $726 per month two years later, according to Experian. The combination of price increases and rising rates has led to an estimated half of Americans being priced out of the car market completely.
As a result of rising prices, Americans are spending through their savings, only holding a collective $768.6 billion in October. Comparatively, Americans held over $1 trillion in savings in May and nearly $6 trillion in April 2020.
“Long story short, inflation hits everything equally,” Young told the DCNF. “It’s a universal regressive tax. It hurts low-income families more because they have less room in their budgets to spare. Low-income families are also less likely to have interest-earning investments to help offset inflation.”
The White House did not respond to a request to comment from the DCNF.
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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.