(The Economic Collapse Blog)—For a long time, it has been clear that the middle class is being systematically destroyed. The cost of living has been rising faster than paychecks have for years, and this has pushed millions of Americans into poverty. As for those that were already impoverished, many of them have been pushed out into the streets. According to the Wall Street Journal, homelessness in the United States is increasing at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2023. Anyone that thinks that we do not have a major problem on our hands simply has not been paying attention. At one time, living “the American Dream” was a goal that the vast majority of Americans could aspire to achieve, but now it is out of reach for most of the country. In fact, a report that was just released concluded that it now takes 3.4 million dollars for the typical U.S. household to live “the American Dream” over the course of a lifetime…
The so-called ‘American Dream’ is the benchmark that many people hope to achieve in their lifetime – getting married, buying a home and a car and raising children.
But new analysis has found that achieving these milestones now costs a staggering $3,455,305 – much more than most Americans will make in their lifetime.
One of the biggest amounts is for paying off a mortgage on a property. The average homebuyer will fork out $796,998, according to Investopedia – assuming a 10 percent down payment and a 30-year fixed loan at 7.2 percent interest.
Are you going to make 3.4 million dollars during your working years?
If not, “the American Dream” is not for you. Sorry.
Today, it is only those that are at the very top of the economic food chain that are thriving.
Once upon a time, America had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now the top 1 percent controls more wealth than the entire middle class…
Thirty years ago, America’s celebrated middle class commanded twice as much wealth as the upper 1%.
Over the years, the rich have grown steadily richer. The top 1% caught and passed the middle class in collective wealth in late 2020, Fed data show.
The top 1% of American earners now control more wealth than the nation’s entire middle class.
This is what happens when power and wealth are highly centralized.
The gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is now bigger than ever.
So good luck trying to live a middle class lifestyle in this environment.
Do you want to buy a couch? Well, the exact same couch that would have cost you $799 in 2019 will now cost you $1,599…
An interior designer has revealed an IKEA couch that used to cost $799 in 2019 is now double the price four years later.
Jilian Dee, a small business owner based in Los Angeles, went viral on TikTok after stitching @loljustmark’s video about the Swedish furniture giant’s ‘crazy’ prices.
Mark, a construction and home décor expert, pointed out that IKEA’s Finnala sofa and chaise now costs a whopping $1,599, saying he wouldn’t pay more than $700 for it.
And don’t even get me started on the price of food.
Beef is already considered to be a “luxury meat”, and it is going to be even more expensive in 2024 because the USDA is projecting that beef production will be way down…
The USDA projects beef production to be down by 180 million pounds over a six-month period by the end of 2023, while the Insider noted that the average size of herds is at 61-year record lows as farmers struggle to feed their animals.
“A lot of our neighbors are selling … The cattle values in general are worth more than they’ve ever been worth before. And quite frankly they’re worth more than what we’re having to pay for hay,” Kent told the FT.
And we are being warned that supplies of many other products in our grocery stores will be getting tighter as well…
As we prepare to step into 2024, it’s important to know what changes are to come over the next year—including the changes that might come to the selection of items at grocery stores.
In 2023, we faced scarcity of several products, from toilet paper to sriracha. Now, there are a few other items that may be become harder to find over the next 12 months.
Factors like environmental challenges, labor shortages, and more could pose a risk to the availability, quality, and affordability of certain spices, dairy products, eggs, seafood, grains, fresh produce, and meat and poultry.
Of course there are some things that you won’t be able to get at all.
Members of Congress have been told that drug shortages in the U.S. recently reached a record high, and this is a problem that is not going away any time soon…
Drug shortages in the U.S. have hit a record high and lawmakers warn they could mean life or death for millions of patients. A House committee is investigating what Congress can do to the supply chain to make sure doctors don’t have to keep rationing essential drugs like cancer treatments.
Health experts agree the shortages of hundreds of generic drugs need urgent attention.
But they’re still trying to build consensus on a remedy.
If you go to the official FDA drug shortage list, you will see that there are 143 entries right now.
And some of the drugs that are in short supply are used millions of times each year…
Critical shortages in the US include albuterol, an asthma and allergy medication used to prevent and treat breathing difficulty; amoxicillin, a crucial antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, including pneumonia, which is seeing rising cases in the US; epinephrine — or adrenaline — a drug used to treat life-threatening conditions like severe allergic reaction.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 54 million prescriptions written for amoxicillin in 2019. In 2020, nearly 62 million albuterol prescriptions were handed out.
I am not going to sugarcoat this for you.
This is a crisis.
In some cases, the lives of American kids are being put in danger because they can’t get the drugs that they desperately need…
One teenage lymphoma patient from Indiana was forced to take a type of chemotherapy that had previously led to a life-threatening allergic reaction, because the medication he had tolerated was out of stock.
Another Florida-based mother of a nine-year-old girl with aggressive Leukemia was told to expect a 15-month wait for a $10 drug that would save the young girl’s life.
So why is this happening?
Well, there are many factors that are contributing to this nightmare, but one of the biggest is the fact that we have become so dependent on China and India…
Another factor driving the problem is the US’ reliance on key materials from China and India to make 95 percent of medicines used in emergency care.
We should have never allowed this to happen.
But we did. And now we will pay a very great price.
If you think that shortages are bad now, just wait until China invades Taiwan. Things will get really crazy at that point.
So I would very much encourage you to prepare in advance for the chaotic times that are rapidly approaching, but unfortunately most Americans still believe that everything will work out just fine somehow.
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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.