(Natural News)—Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat elected in December, provided a bleak warning during a City Hall meeting about the city’s “broke” finances as he proposed a five percent cut across all city spending to alleviate the cash flow problem.
“I think we can all agree that we’re broke,” Whitmire said, before proposing the planned cuts. “This gives us a chance to discuss the financial picture of this city. It is broken. It was broken when I got here.”
With an estimated current deficit of at least $160 million, Whitmire’s current proposal is for a five percent across-the-board cut to the entire budget of the city’s government, with exceptions for the budgets of firefighters and police.
“I don’t like a five percent cut now, but you have to make tough decisions and folks put me in this position to make tough decisions, and I’m going to do my job,” said Whitmire. (Related: Mayor of El Paso, Texas says his city is now at BREAKING POINT due to influx of ILLEGALS.)
Whitmire’s short tenure has seen him cough up an additional $650 million from the city budget for seven years of back pay and an additional $180 million for annual wage hikes over the next five years following the conclusion of a long-festering labor dispute with city firefighters.
Analysts say the deal delivers taxpayers a substantial discount from the amount an arbitrator would have likely awarded the aggrieved firefighters.
“This is going to come down to a financial sacrifice by the City. Now we can either be $1.2 billion broke or we can be $650 million broke,” said City Councilmember Willie Davis of the deal.
Councilmember Tiffany Thomas expressed alarm at the city’s mounting debt and warned that the city government might start charging Houston residents more for services.
“Are we going to fee Houstonians? Is it a trash fee? Are we paying for parking after six? Are we going after Metro’s money? I mean what are we doing?” asked Thomas.
The mayor says the search for additional funding is underway and could include asking the taxpayers to step up. “I’m not going to play games with people’s lives. I’m not going to play politics with people’s lives. So we have a responsibility to settle with the firefighters and protect Houstonians,” said Whitmire.
Houston has had problems with inflated spending for years
Houston, the United States’ fourth largest city, has had a problem with its spending for years. But the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the assistance the city received from the federal government during this time provided some leeway for the city to mask its overspending.
“COVID really silenced the conversation because we got so much money from the federal government that we were able to make our budgets work, but really, this problem started 20 years ago, almost a quarter of a century ago, with the pension funds,” said John Diamond, director of the Center for Public Finance at Rice University.
Former Mayor Sylvester Turner, another Democrat who left office in January, falsely claimed he was leaving the city with a $420 million surplus.
“The budget surplus is largely thanks to $1 billion in federal recovery funds Houston received during the pandemic, which Turner has mostly used to cover city expenses while driving up its reserve account,” wrote Houston Chronicle staff writer Dylan McGuinness.
During his time in office, Turner who could not run again due to term limits, was criticized by former Mayor Annise Parker, financial groups and even the city comptroller for his handling of public funds.
“Let me just say, the sky is not falling,” Turner told the local paper last year. But local critics insist Turner wasn’t telling the truth.
“This has been obvious to anyone following the city’s finances for well over a decade,” said local businessman Bill King. “The you-know-what would have hit the fan in the last administration had it not been for this incredible influx of federal dollars.”
A tax hike through a bond is expected in November.
“That’s very likely what we’re looking at, going to the voters this November and saying, ‘Here’s the plan, here’s what it’s going to cost, and we’re asking you to chip in,'” City Controller Chris Hollins said.
Critics say the city should not default to taxing residents when they could raise the money by cutting the fat inside city hall and selling city property, including a very valuable art collection owned by the city. “The first thing we need to do is find where the money is first as opposed to the typical liberal answer to every problem: raise taxes on the people,” conservative political analyst Gary Polland suggested.
Visit GreaterTexan.news for similar stories involving Texas and its cities. Watch this short clip of a flight full of illegal immigrants bound for Houston.
This video is from the GalacticStorm channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
Houston hWE HAVE A PROBLEM: 4 Mexican drug cartels are operating inside Colony Ridge migrant settlement.
Sources include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.