(The Center Square)–On the third to last day of session, the Texas legislature advanced a two-year $338 billion budget that fiscal conservatives argue is “California style budgeting.”
The Texas House and Senate approved a conference committee bill Saturday that finalized SB 1, the state’s budget.
“Texas becomes stronger and stronger each biennium because our conservative principles guide our approach to budgeting,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said. “These principles have kept our state on the right track and will continue to do so for years to come. The Senate’s All Funds budget for Texas was 1.2% larger than last biennium, well within our limit of population growth times inflation.”
Patrick says the bill commits “a record $51 billion for property tax relief” with “nearly one out of every four dollars in state funds” devoted to property tax relief. The budget also includes a record $8.5 billion for public education funding, The Center Square reported.
With record high spending, the legislature still kept the budget conservative, Patrick argued, “with billions of dollars unspent and without touching the rainy day fund” that will “keep our state prosperous over the next biennium and beyond.”
Despite Texas posting a $24 billion surplus and calls from fiscal conservatives to cut spending, waste, fraud and abuse, and implement meaningful tax reform, the Republican-led legislature expanded spending and spent the surplus.
Patrick said the state’s $338 billion All Funds budget was a 1.2% increase from the last biennium; the $237.1 billion All State Funds budget was a 4.8% increase.
These and other claims made by Republicans in support of the budget are “wildly misleading,” economist Vance Ginn argues in an analysis. Ginn helped author the 2017 federal tax cuts under President Donald Trump, led tax policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and now runs an Austin-based consulting firm.
If the budget “is what passes for fiscal conservatism in Texas, then California-style budgeting has officially arrived in the Lone Star State,” Ginn said. “Texans aren’t seeing relief – they’re seeing rising tax bills.”
The $51 billion claim refers to “every dollar allocated to property tax relief since 2019, spanning four budget cycles: 2020–21 through 2026–27,” Ginn said, not from a single two-year budget approved on Saturday. Since 2019, the legislature appropriated roughly $1.16 trillion in total funds, meaning “‘record tax relief’ equals just 4.4% of overall appropriations – while the other 95.6%, or $1.1 trillion, went to growing government,” Ginn said.
“Of the $51 billion, only $3.5 billion is truly new property tax relief,” Ginn added. Another $3 billion in property tax relief was already included in current law, after the legislature enacted HB 3 in 2019, which automatically implements relief “unless the Legislature deliberately chooses not to fund it,” he said. “At most, only $3.5 billion of new relief is at stake – barely a drop in the bucket” compared to the state’s $24 billion surplus.
State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Waxahachie, said the budget that passed is “the most bloated, liberal, budget ever written in the history of the state of Texas.”
Instead of returning the $24 billion surplus to “the overtaxed, hard working men and women of the state of Texas,” the budget “funds just about every liberal priority under the sun,” he said. The budget includes “doubling down and increasing budgets for state agencies and entities that are engaged in DEI and transgender ideology” and “puts crony corporatism and corporate welfare on steroids.”
More importantly, he argues, is what the budget doesn’t do: reduce property taxes.
“The men and women of the state of Texas wanted us to do just one thing this session … only one thing … to get the crushing burden of property taxes under control,” and the legislature “abjectly failed.”
Based on current projections and what’s in the budget, “the vast majority of property taxpayers and property tax bills in the state of Texas are going to go up,” Harrison said. “This budget represents an absolute betrayal of the hard-working men and women of the state of Texas and they deserve better. There is no way a fiscally conservative Republican” could vote for it.
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.
