(The Economic Collapse Blog)—The middle class in the United States has been steadily shrinking, and the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us has grown to absurd proportions. But it wasn’t always this way. When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like almost everyone was middle class. Of course there were wealthy people and poor people in the 1980s too, but the vast majority of the population was comfortably somewhere in the middle. Sadly, things have changed so much since that time. Today, most of the people that I know are struggling. According to a report that was just released, in all 50 states it now takes an income of more than $100,000 in order for a family of four to live “the American Dream”…
A new report from GOBankingRates used that framework to analyze how much money a family of two adults and two children would need in each state to own a home, a car and a pet. The report tallied estimated annual essential expenses for such a family and then doubled that figure.
Using that framework, GoBankingRates found that all 50 states require more than a $100,000 annual income, according to the report, with 38 states needing more than $140,000.
Is your family bringing in more than $100,000 a year? If not, “the American Dream” is not for you. Sorry.
Our leaders purposely pursued policies that they knew would cause inflation, and when new money enters the system most of it tends to flow into the hands of those at the top of the economic food chain.
So the ultra-wealthy have been doing very well in this economic environment, but high inflation is absolutely eviscerating all the rest of us.
At this point, it takes the average U.S. household an extra $1,069 per month just to purchase the same goods and services that it did three years ago…
Inflation is once again gaining steam, forcing the average American to shell out a lot more money for everyday necessities.
The typical U.S. household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation, according to calculations from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi shared with FOX Business.
Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 more compared with three years ago, before the inflation crisis began.
What we are witnessing is the collapse of the middle class.
The cost of living has been rising faster than incomes have been, and that is putting an extraordinary amount of financial stress on U.S. households.
For example, the cost of auto insurance has risen more than 22 percent over the past 12 months…
The cost of auto insurance rose 2.6% in March, bringing the total annual gain to 22.2% — the fastest yearly rate on record. When compared with the beginning of 2021, before the inflation crisis began, motor vehicle insurance is more than 50% more expensive.
Housing costs have been increasing at an even faster pace. If you can believe it, the average monthly mortgage payment on a newly purchased home has risen by 96 percent in just four years…
The real estate firm Zillow reports that since January 2020, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical U.S. home has nearly doubled. It’s up 96% in just four years.
According to Zillow, a typical buyer will now pay nearly $2,200 a month, with a 10% down payment. Meaning, homeownership now costs well above the 30% of median income that was once thought to equate to “affordable” housing cost in America.
Home ownership is now out of reach for a huge chunk of the population.
Needless to say, that isn’t a good thing. Why aren’t the American people more upset about all of this?
In a desperate attempt to maintain a middle class standard of living, many Americans are piling up enormous amounts of debt.
According to CNBC, some economists believe “that debt growth has become a substitution for income growth”…
Economists have suggested that debt growth has become a substitution for income growth. Student loan debt reached an all-time high of $1.77 trillion in the first quarter of 2023 and Americans collectively owe $1.13 trillion on their credit cards as of the fourth quarter of 2023. This debt can have a ripple effect, especially when entire generations are starting their adulthoods with thousands of dollars in debt.
In many cases, people that have greatly overextended themselves now find themselves absolutely drowning in debt.
One 28-year-old woman that purchased a Chevy Tahoe three years ago still owed $74,000 to GM Financial and was eventually forced to sell the vehicle…
Three years ago, 28-year-old Blaisey Arnold entered a local auto dealership and came away with the keys to an $84,000 Chevy Tahoe.
But this month, the wedding photographer and mother shared a video to TikTok describing how she was forced to sell her dream car.
Despite paying $1,400 a month in payments totaling more than $50,000, she still owes a balance of $74,000 to her lender – GM Financial.
Can you believe that? Of course she is far from alone.
At this point, millions upon millions of Americans have gotten into trouble with debt, and credit card delinquency rates have risen to unprecedented levels…
Delinquency rates among American credit card holders are at an all-time high, while at the same time a record number of “active accounts” have “a balance of over $2,000,” according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report.
If Americans really understood what our politicians in Washington and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve were doing to us, there would be massive protests in the streets right now.
These days, a lot of Americans that had actually retired are now heading back to work due to the rapidly rising cost of living. Hope Murray is one of those people…
Hope Murray retired in 2013 after a 50-year career that ranged from game show producer to Hollywood party planner to casino executive.
She settled into a life of golf, game nights and pickleball in her San Diego community, her daughter living nearby.
Then things got more expensive. Gas was nearly $5 a gallon, medication costs were adding up, the grocery bill was increasing.
Can you imagine going back to work when you are 80 years old?
That is what she had to do, and now she spends her retirement years handing out samples at Costco…
So last October, at the age of 80, Murray ended her retirement and got a job giving out samples at Costco.
She likes observing the people – some go grocery shopping in heels and a full face of makeup and others wear pajamas and slippers. Some people take one sample and others gobble three or four.
“It just comes into my checking account every other week, and I can pay for everything,” she said of her $18-an-hour paycheck.
In recent months, prices have started to surge once again.
It has become clear that the cost of living crisis is not going away any time soon.
The middle class in the United States is going to continue to shrink, and that is not good news for any of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
Wunderbar ——— all those who supported the dismantling of the US tax base and economy, in their ARDENT SUPPORT for the offshoring of America in the name of the MYTHICAL FREE MARKET ——— now scream about the vanishing middle class, which will be gone entirely by or before 2027!
Easy enough to pump up housimg eternally in America: allow foreign purchasing and ownership in tjh $90 billion plus per year spent by FOREIGN BUYERS (mostly from communist China) while allowing in millions of ILLEGAL INVADERS — disaster for the citizenry, all by design!
Yes this is all true, however Trump’s economic game plan was the catalyst for all this. He teed things up for Biden who is now driving things into the ground.
Trumps spending didn’t do us any favors and as a honest conservative, Trumps reckless spending ($8 trillion in deficits) did contribute significantly to the inflation we have seen. That is an undeniable fact!
The left has always looked to find ways to impoverish the middle class, taxes, borrowing, printing money, the green energy scam, all contribute. This is nothing new, it’s been going on for decades.