(The Epoch Times)—An estimated 21.8 million senior citizens in America make ends meet solely using their social security funds, The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) said in a June 20 statement.
There are more than 68 million Social Security beneficiaries as of 2024, according to data from the Social Security Administration (SSA).
“Almost two-thirds of seniors who completed the survey said they were dissatisfied with the amount they receive from their monthly Social Security checks,” said the TSCL statement.
Ninety-four percent said the 2025 COLA of 2.5 percent was too low, and their benefits did not keep pace with economic inflation. COLA is an annual adjustment to social security payments made to ensure that benefits keep pace with inflation. The SSA announces the COLA in October every year, which is implemented in the following year.
Moreover, many believe that last year’s actual inflation was considerably higher than the government’s estimate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 2024 inflation to be 2.9 percent.
Nearly all, or 95 percent, said that reforming Social Security and Medicare should be taken as a top priority by the federal administration and Congress. A majority were in favor of “calculating the COLA with an inflation index that better represents seniors’ economic experiences.”
The January to March 2025 survey was conducted among 3,050 American seniors over the age of 62 who were eligible for their Social Security benefits. Out of those who took the survey, 1,920 provided enough data to use in the study.
According to the survey report, the median U.S. senior lives on $1,000-$2,000 a month. This includes 13 percent of seniors living on less than $1,000 a month.
“TSCL estimates that approximately 7.3 million American seniors survive on less than $1,000 a month, which would put them below $15,650 for the year, the 2025 Federal poverty line for a household of one. TSCL also estimates that another 24.5 million survive on between $1,000 and $2,000,” said the report.
“This is especially challenging for seniors who rent, like 36 percent of those who participated in this study. The average U.S. rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,327 as of May 2025.”
Nearly 40 percent of seniors were found to be dependent on social security “for the entirety of their income.” Around 73 percent depend on these benefits for over half their income.
“Seniors who live on only Social Security are much more likely to live on extremely meager incomes. In total, 20 percent of seniors who depend on Social Security for 100 percent of their income live on $1,000 or less per month, compared to 13 percent of seniors overall,” said the report.
The survey found that many seniors claimed their benefits early at the cost of penalties.
People who wait for retirement, 66-67 years of age, get benefits based on their historical earnings. However, those who start claiming benefits as early as 62 years of age will suffer a permanent reduction in monthly receipts of up to 30 percent.
“About 68 percent of seniors start claiming their Social Security benefits before retirement age. A plurality, 42 percent, claim their benefits as soon as they are eligible in exchange for a 30 percent reduction,” according to the report.
The biggest reason seniors choose to claim their benefits early is financial pressure, said the report.
A third of the respondents reported taking benefits early because they were unable to meet living expenses, such as groceries or rent, without these benefits. In addition, 22 percent took benefits early to handle a medical emergency or deal with a medical issue.
Calculation Reforms
Most survey participants advocated for reforms in COLA calculation, with the popular opinion being to use an inflation index representing their economic experiences rather than solely relying on urban wages.
At present, COLA is calculated using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners. TSCL advocated switching the COLA calculation to the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly.
“The data in this study shows what seniors have been telling TSCL for years: Social Security checks aren’t keeping up with inflation,” said TSCL executive director Shannon Benton.
“If four in five seniors think inflation was higher than the government reported in 2024, maybe we should stop questioning their experiences and start questioning why the COLA is failing to measure them.”
Benton warned against any move to cut Social Security. Given that it makes up at least half the incomes earned by almost three-quarters of seniors, cuts to the program would “push millions of hard-working Americans further into poverty, robbing them of their right to retire with dignity.”
According to data from the SSA, before 2020, the last time there was a COLA adjustment of 5 percent or more was in 2008 when COLA was 5.8 percent. Post 2020, COLAs of 5.9 and 8.7 percent were implemented in 2021 and 2022, respectively.
In 2023, COLA dropped to 3.2 percent, moving down to 2.5 percent in 2024, with the same rate implemented this year as well.
In a June 11 statement, TSCL predicted COLA for 2026 to be 2.5 percent.
If inflation were to rise in any significant manner over the coming months, for instance, due to the tariff policies being followed by the current Trump administration, COLA for next year could be pushed up as well.
$2,000 Checks, Fund Depletion
The TSCL survey comes at a time when the average social security payment for retired workers has hit $2,000 per month for the first time ever. According to SSA data, the average monthly payment stood at $2,002.39 in May, up 4.5 percent from a year ago. Retired workers make up 75 percent of Social Security beneficiaries.
The average benefit for all individuals, including retired and non-retired individuals, was $1,857.75 last month.
Meanwhile, social security funds are at risk of being depleted earlier than expected.
The 2025 OASDI trustees report, published on June 18, revealed that the cost of the social security program started exceeding its income in 2021. The funds are expected to be depleted by 2034, one year earlier than last year’s projections.
Post this date, SSA will only be able to pay beneficiaries 81 percent of the scheduled benefits.
“The Trustees recommend that lawmakers address the projected trust fund shortfalls in a timely way in order to phase in necessary changes gradually and give workers and beneficiaries time to adjust,” the report said.
“Implementing changes sooner rather than later would allow more generations to share in the needed revenue increases or reductions in scheduled benefits.”
In February, a group of lawmakers introduced the Social Security Expansion Act to tackle the issue, according to a Feb. 7 statement from the office of Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Ore.).
The legislation seeks to ensure that social security remains fully funded for the next 75 years by applying the social security payroll tax to all annual incomes higher than $250,000. The bill also aims to boost benefits by $2,400 per year.
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.
The seniors should have pretended they were illegal migrants, than saved the hundred thousand dollars a year cumulative benefits. They probably still can in deep blue locations. Good thing we funded the entirety of the Eukranians and even paid their pensioners for the past several years. What would they have done without the assistance from American tax payers? Your tax dollars hard at work.
Many people take a SS reduction to ‘retire early’ because by the time you’re 68 half your friends are dead and buried, and you can hardly move around the house and get out of bed on time, much less work a full time job.
From the cradle to the grave, under this system everyone is an open air financial slave. The federal reserve, over a hundred years of not being federal, and not having any reserves. Americans have truly lost sight of how much wealth has been pilfered from the country over the last few generations of hucksters and financial predators. Otherwise every retirement program could have been adequately funded, people would be able to claim additional and multiple pensions on top of SS, and the retirement age could have gone down to under fifty years rather than crawling up incrementally, soon to be over seventy. Again; Your tax dollars, hard at work. But that’s what you get when you ask more of the government and become dependent on the government, you get more government. They don’t work for free.