Editor’s Note: Stories like the one below by Gary M. Galles are the reason that I’ve FINALLY done my due diligence with precious metals companies. I panned them for years, denying them from sponsoring my sites or shows. But I changed my tune when it became clear last year that our own government is working against the American people and in recent months that decision has been vindicated. The Biden-Harris regime IS working against us. They want us poor. They want our investments and retirement depleted.
They want a reason to “build back better” in preparation for The Great Reset.”
One of the reasons I was reluctant until last year to take on precious metals sponsors is because the vast majority of them support Democrats. Some of them work directly with proxies of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s an ugly industry that thrives on fearmongering and the suffering of Americans, so I stayed clear until about a year ago when it become necessary to research and vet out the companies to see if any of them were America First organizations. Out of over two dozen companies I checked, I found only three that don’t work against this nation.
Keep that in mind as you read through the article below. Unfortunately, the precious metals companies recommended by many other conservative and alternative news outlets are owned and managed by people who take your money and donate some of it to Democrats. I suppose that makes sense for some precious metals companies since tanking the economy benefits precious metals prices and Democrats are great at tanking our economy. I’ll only recommend companies that aren’t trying to destroy us, and sadly that’s barely over 10% of the companies I checked out. Here’s Gary’s article…
There has long been a cottage industry of telling Americans they don’t save enough. One of many Wall Street Journal articles in this genre, for instance, was Kelly Greene’s “Workers Saving Too Little to Retire.” The U.S. government’s AboutUSA.gov site even included “Save more” on a list of recommendations for citizens’ New Year’s resolutions.
But our government has long been waging war on savings, making it the cause of, rather than the solution to, low savings rates. As a result, Americans have fewer resources for investment, innovation, technological advancement, and education, which reduces real economic growth and citizens’ wellbeing. Recent policies have illustrated this to an impossible-to-miss extent.
For years, governments at all levels imposed COVID-related restrictions and shutdowns that forced vast numbers of Americans to draw heavily on their savings. Government “solutions,” like cash handouts before elections and higher unemployment benefits, only increased government debt, the financing of which requires that the government suck even more savings out of productive, private use.
The recent jump in inflation is the predictable effect of recent monetary policy profligacy, another part of government’s war on savings. Just ask any American who was faced with near double-digit inflation, but whose bank accounts were still paying interest rates under one percent.
Similarly, the President’s college loan proposal tells people to take past educational expenses they had already agreed to pay back out of other people’s pockets instead. Further, it tells them to borrow more for future education expenses as well, rather than to save for it, as they will be less likely to have to pay what they borrow. Saving less for college, and borrowing still more in order, ultimately, to raid other Americans’ pockets will also leave us with fewer resources to save.
But such recent sorties in the government war on Americans’ savings are just the latest in a long list.
One huge policy-induced savings problem is that people have been led to substitute Social Security’s vastly under-funded promise of retirement benefits for funds they would have saved to finance their “golden years.” Not only do those Social Security taxes and future-benefit promises crowd out savings, but because promised benefits are trillions of dollars greater than current rates of taxation can sustain, people anticipate being “richer” in retirement than they will actually be, reducing saving even more. Those who save enough to provide well for their retirement also face income taxes on up to 85 percent of their Social Security benefits as well, lowering the rate of return on such responsibility.
Social Security exacerbates the crowding-out problem of government budget deficits, which take funds that would have gone to private investment and divert them to government. The federal debt has skyrocketed to “pay” for recent government “rescues,” but Social Security’s unfunded liabilities are even greater than the official federal debt.
Taxes on capital also reduce saving by reducing the after-tax returns on investments. These include property taxes that, while relatively small percentages of the capital invested, are sizable fractions of the annual income generated. Then state and federal (and sometimes local) corporate taxes take further bites from income, reducing the after-tax return still more. The implicit “tax” imposed by expanding regulatory burdens must also be borne, before earnings can go to investors.
Personal income taxes at up to three levels of government reduce saving even more. Investment income (what is left after other taxes) is taxed again, if paid out as dividends. Earnings from saving and investment can also trigger additional tax burdens like phase-outs of income tax deductions.
If investment earnings are retained and reinvested, increasing asset values, they are taxed as capital gains upon sale. Further, there are substantial limits on using losses on some assets to offset gains on others, as those whose portfolios have taken big hits have been made well aware. And even increases in asset values that only reflect inflation, which is a far greater issue now than in the recent past, are taxed as if they were real increases in wealth. That can be a huge problem: in the 1970s, the real (inflation-adjusted) return on the S&P 500 was negative, due to high inflation. Yet people and companies still had to pay taxes, often at very high marginal tax rates, on illusionary profits.
Many other government policies also reduce saving.
Coverage from Medicare, whose unfunded liabilities are far greater than Social Security’s, reduces incentives to save for future medical costs. Further, current earners, who must cover three quarters of the cost, are left with less income to save. Medicaid (MediCal where I live) covers nursing home costs only after other assets are exhausted, undermining another motive to save (and has created an entire industry dedicated to gaming the system).
Unemployment benefits, along with food stamps and other poverty programs, also reduce the need to save “just in case.” This mechanism was recently supercharged with unemployment benefits that often exceeded what people could have earned in their current jobs. And as we have seen with any number of disasters, government steps in to assist those who proclaim they “need” it, reducing the incentives for financial self-responsibility.
Estate taxes also reduce successful savers’ ability to pass on assets to heirs, another major motive to save.
Each of these government policies acts as a disincentive to save. Together, they heavily punish saving, reducing it to the point that many do not have any appreciable savings (which many then claim is a “market failure” government must fix, rather than a government failure). And the recent ratcheting up of anti-savings policies escalates the policy war on savings, which is also a war on investment and economic growth. Truly addressing the savings problem doesn’t require more government involvement; it only requires that the government stop undermining our incentives to save in all the ways it does now.
Article cross-posted from AIER.
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.
