Republicans who backed Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s debt deal with the Biden-Harris regime expect you to believe that they got huge wins in spending cuts in exchange for suspending the debt limit until 2025.
The Uniparty Swamp got what they wanted without having to give up, well, anything. It was all theater to set the stage for the House of Representatives to pass the comically named “Fiscal Responsibility Act” while maintaining the illusion of battle. In reality, only a few staunch conservatives and their radical leftist counterparts were opposed to it.
This will pass in the Senate on Friday and hit Joe Biden’s desk just in time to usher in 19 months of unfettered Big Government spending.
He negotiated a stronger deal with Chipotle. #NoDeal https://t.co/QCyOvRi0NH
— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) May 31, 2023
Here are the “victories” McCarthy got with the exceptional leverage he went in with at the start of negotiations:
- Debt Ceiling Suspended: This is, of course, not a victory at all as it will balloon the national debt by at least $4 trillion, but hey, at least we won’t suffer the dreaded default that Janet Yellen wielded deftly for fearmongering effect.
- Caps on Non-Defense Spending: They rolled back spending to fiscal 2022 levels and “only” allowed for 1% annual growth over the next six years. This is not a victory. Fiscal 2022 was way too high already. Rolling it back to those levels is like saying we’re going to cut back on heroine use to three times a day instead of four. As an unnamed White House official noted, “It’s flat. It’s a difference of about $1 billion. In a divided government, we’re not going to get the kinds of [nondefense discretionary] increases that we would hope to get.”
- Expand Work Requirements for Food Stamps: Of all the various aspects of Kabuki Theater the Uniparty Swamp engaged in, this is the most ridiculous. It drew plenty of headlines as corporate media and Democrats bemoaned this “attack” on the needy. But both they and the Republicans who generally ignored it hoped Americans would hear the words “expanded work requirements” and form an opinion without knowing the details. Those details: Raising the age of “able-bodied adults” who need to work in order to get food stamps from 49-years-old to 55-years-old. Yes, all the drama was over a six year bump.
- Rescind Leftover Covid-19 Funds: $28 billion will be rescinded. That’s good. But it’s a drop in the $4 trillion bucket, and it shouldn’t have needed to be part of the debt ceiling negotiations. In fact, why was this not covered already? Did McCarthy save it as a “card” to play for theater? Yep.
- 2% Cut to IRS Spending: Don’t get me started. This is a joke. We should have cut IRS spending down to 2%, not by 2%. In fact, we should have abolished the “service” altogether.
There’s more to it, but those are the highlights. Meanwhile, the Uniparty Swamp had fun on Wednesday pretending to fight each other.
And by “pretending” to fight, let’s briefly mention what everyone should already know. The votes were already set before floor debate. Nobody changed their mind today. Again, this is all part of theater, in case you’re one of the people watching the show.
McCarthy Caved and Forced RINOs to Cave With Him
The saddest part about all this is that McCarthy had the leverage to make real changes in Washington DC. There is no scenario in which corporate media and their puppet masters in the Democrat Party could have spun a default as completely McCarthy’s fault if no debt deal was done.
The economy would have seen major challenges, perhaps even massive ones. It likely would have hit the stock market hard and sent us into a deeper recession. This is why McCarthy could have pressed for far more than he got. The people generally blame the party in the White House when hard times come and the Biden-Harris regime knows this.
McCarthy had the leverage. He gave away the farm. He could have forced meaningful cuts.
Instead of going to the right, McCarthy decided to head to the murky middle knowing he would upset fiscal conservatives and much of the GOP base. He knew America First Republicans wouldn’t vote for it, so he went far closer to the center than he needed to so he could get Democrats to vote for it.
As Senator Mike Lee noted:
House Republicans concerned about the Biden-McCarthy deal had the votes to kill it—until 52 House Democrats rushed to the bill’s rescue and saved it. How exactly is this a Republican bill?
House Republicans concerned about the Biden-McCarthy deal had the votes to kill it—until 52 House Democrats rushed to the bill’s rescue and saved it. How exactly is this a Republican bill?https://t.co/u2T2j36Mmx
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 31, 2023
The only thing “Republican” about this bill is that it demonstrates the GOP is officially the RINO wing of the Uniparty Swamp. Those conservatives in the minority are essentially powerless.
I’m voting no because the people I represent in Pinellas County are NOT happy with this so-called “deal.”
A deal that doesn’t benefit Americans + benefits special interests + keeps funding for the 87K IRS agents = #NoDeal pic.twitter.com/JbbeZTZwER
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) May 30, 2023
This is a horrible deal for Americans. Unfortunately, we’ve grown accustomed to constant disappointment from Capitol Hill regardless of who is allegedly in control.
More Democrats voted in favor of the Fiscal Irresponsibility Act than Republicans. That should tell you all you need to know about Kevin McCarthy.
More Democrats voted in favor of the "Fiscal Responsibility Act" than Republicans. That should tell you all you need to know about @SpeakerMcCarthy.
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) June 1, 2023
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
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.
Ron Paul; People call bureaucrats partisan, but that’s not the case, not even close. There is one thing the government always agrees on; spending more of your money. They always come together and reach agreements for this purpose, always.