Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), a longtime critic of inflationary policies in Washington, blasted the White House and congressional leaders for not doing enough to stem the tide of rising inflation, potentially endangering Democrats’ hopes of passing a scaled-down version of the Build Back Better (BBB) social spending package.
Article by Joseph Lord from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
On July 13, the Department of Labor released its latest Consumer Price Index (CPI), showing that consumer prices have gone up by 9.1 percent over the past year, exceeding predictions and hitting a new 40-year high.
The CPI showed that energy has been the hardest hit, with costs rising by around 41.6 percent across the board for all types of energy. Gasoline prices have risen by a staggering 98.5 percent.
Other essentials have also been hard hit: in the past 12 months, the cost of food has gone up an average of 10.4 percent.
In a July 13 statement, Manchin, who has long been vociferous in calling for his party to do more to combat inflation, said: “Today’s inflation data illustrates the pain families across the country are feeling as costs continue to rise at a historic rate. 9.1% is cause for serious concern.
“Items like chicken, eggs and lunchmeat have increased to all-time highs, while energy costs rose more than 40% in June with those that can least afford it suffering the most. It is past time we put our country first and end this inflation crisis.
“For more than a year, leaders in Washington have ignored the serious concerns raised by myself and others about the rising cost of inflation,” Manchin continued. “While Washington seems to now understand this reality, it is time for us to work together to get unnecessary spending under control, produce more energy at home and take more active and serious steps to address this record inflation that now poses a clear and present danger to our economy.
“No matter what spending aspirations some in Congress may have, it is clear to anyone who visits a grocery store or a gas station that we cannot add any more fuel to this inflation fire,” he concluded.
The statement could spell trouble for Democrats who hope to pass through a scaled-down version of the BBB, which originally failed over Manchin’s concerns about inflation in December 2021.
In December, after months of scrambled negotiations with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Manchin dashed Democrats’ hopes when he said he wouldn’t vote for the package amid continued concerns about inflation.
Since then, some Democrats have made efforts behind the scenes to push for a revival of the package. Although Manchin has been loosely involved in these negotiations, they’ve only recently gained traction, winning the support of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who’s now making a desperate push to reach a scaled-down agreement on BBB before the end of the summer.
But any such package is far from close to being ready, according to Manchin spokesperson Sam Runyon.
“Suggestions that a reconciliation deal is close are false. Sen. Manchin still has serious unresolved concerns, and there is a lot of work to be done before it’s conceivable that a deal can be reached he can sign onto,” Runyon said.
A particular focus of Democrats with the package has been on climate policy.
Many Democrats have pushed for tax credits for clean energy manufacturing, taxing methane emissions, and a new tax on carbon-intensive imports such as steel. However, this newest inflation report could make Manchin hesitant to accept any such new spending, particularly as his concerns continue to remain unresolved about the proposed package itself.
To pay for these policies, Democrats have pushed for a repeal of several provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—a proposal that the moderate Sinema isn’t enthusiastic about.
During the last round of BBB negotiations, several sources reported that Sinema—who generally declines to comment on her policy positions during negotiations—was opposed to re-hiking the corporate and income tax rates from their post-2017 levels.
It isn’t clear if Sinema maintains her opposition on this front. But if she does, it could put another kink in Democrats’ aspirations to fund the measure.
The legislation also faces potential challenges from Republicans.
On July 7, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) renewed an earlier threat to tank the bipartisan United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), a measure designed to increase U.S. competitiveness with China.
The House and Senate have each passed their own versions of the legislation, and bicameral committees are currently working to hammer out the differences between the versions passed by each chamber.
The White House and Senate alike are anxious to see the competitiveness legislation passed, further heightening the challenges that Democrats could face in moving ahead with a scaled-back BBB.
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.
