(End of the American Dream)—It takes strength to be free. That is why they want us to be weak. When we are weak, we are much more likely to become dependent upon the system to survive, and that makes us much easier to control. So they give us junk to eat, they put poisons into our air and water, they “dumb us down” from a very early age, they feed us a steady stream of “programming” that makes us depressed and afraid, they get us hooked on legal and illegal drugs, and they constantly try to get us into as much debt as possible. Something that a rapper known as Zuby posted on Twitter sums this up perfectly…
He really nailed it.
We were created to be independent beings, but the elite are constantly attempting to make us as dependent as possible.
Here in the United States, we are supposed to be the most prosperous nation on the entire planet. And yet most of us are living like servants.
When I was growing up, $80,000 sounded like an enormous mountain of money. And it actually was a very significant amount of money in those days. But in 2025 it just doesn’t go that far. Today, the median household income in the U.S. is approximately $80,000 a year. Approximately half of all U.S. households make more than that, and approximately half of all U.S. households make less than that. So if your family earns $80,000 in 2025 that would put you about right in the middle.
So can a typical family of four survive on $80,000 in America today? The answer might surprise you. Over the past four years, the cost of living has been rising much faster than our paychecks have. As a result, our standard of living has been steadily going down.
$80,000 breaks down to about $6,666 a month. So how far will $6,666 a month stretch for a family of four in today’s economy?….
First of all, our hypothetical family of four needs a place to live. As I discussed the other day, the household income required to purchase a typical home in the U.S. has more than tripled since January 2012. At this point, the average mortgage payment in the U.S. is about $2,200.
So after paying the mortgage, we only have $4,466 left.
Next, our family of four has to pay for utilities for their home. According to Google AI, the average U.S. household spends $600 a month on their utilities bills.
So now we only have $3,866 left.
Our family is also going to need phone and Internet service. Cell phone bills for a family of four can balloon to ridiculous proportions, but let’s assume that our family of four is extremely budget conscious and has found a package where they can get basic phone service for 50 dollars a month and Internet service for 50 dollars a month.
Now we are down to $3,766.
In our hypothetical household, both parents are also going to need vehicles to get to work. Let’s assume that both vehicles were purchased used, so the payments will only total about $600 a month. If the vehicles were purchased new this number could potentially be much higher.
Suddenly we only have $3,166 remaining.
If our family has two vehicles that means that they will also be paying for automobile insurance. Let’s assume that they both have exemplary driving records and so they are only spending about $100 a month.
Now our total is just $3,066.
Our hypothetical family of four is also going to need health insurance. According to Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, a typical family of four will spend $1,437 a month on health insurance.
Ouch.
Now we only have $1,629 left.
Our hypothetical family is also going to have to eat. Let’s assume that our family clips coupons and cuts corners any way that it can and only spends about $50 for each member of the family on food and toiletries each week. That works out to a total of $800 a month for the entire family.
I know that number may seem way too low to many of you, but let’s go with it.
That brings our remaining cash down to just $829.
Needless to say, our hypothetical family will also need to buy gasoline to get to and from work each week. Let’s assume that they don’t live too far from work and only need to fill up both vehicles about once per week. That would give them a gasoline bill of about $50 a week or $200 a month. Of course if either of them has a long commute to work or if a lot of extra driving is required for other reasons this expense could be far, far higher.
After everything that we have gone through so far, we actually have $629 left.
That is a reason to celebrate, right? Wrong. We haven’t taken federal, state and local taxes out of the paycheck yet. Federal, state and local taxes will reduce your paycheck by about one-fourth.
So after taxes, we are now $1,371 in the hole.
Up to this point we have assumed that our family does not have any credit card debt or student loan debt at all. If they do, those payments will have to be made as well.
In addition, the budget above includes no money for clothing, no money for dining out, no money for additional entertainment, no money for medications, no money for pets, no money for hobbies, no money for life insurance, no money for vacations, no money for vehicle repairs and maintenance, no money for child care, no money for birthday or holiday gifts, and no money for retirement.
On top of everything else, if our family of four has a catastrophic health expense that health insurance will not pay for, then our hypothetical family of four is suddenly facing a complete and utter financial catastrophe.
Are you starting to get the picture? Most of us are just desperately trying to find a way to scrape by from month to month, and that is the way that the elite like it.
Do you feel like you are a hamster on a wheel that is never really getting anywhere? Well, the truth is that what you are feeling is very real, because the entire system has been designed to keep us all trapped for as long as possible.
It is time to wake up, get strong, and realize what life is really all about. You were not designed to be a cog in their machine. If you don’t take control of your life, someone else will. I promise you that.
If you don’t want to be a hamster on a wheel, stop listening to their lies and start living the way that you were designed to live.
We were meant to be free, but the elite will happily keep you enslaved if you allow them to do so.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
