(The Daily Signal)—America’s “War on Poverty,” launched by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, has expanded into a vast array of federal social welfare programs that today exceed $1 trillion per year.
Upon signing the Economic Opportunity Act, Johnson stated: “This is not in any sense a cynical proposal to exploit the poor with a promise of a handout” but rather a means to “help our people find their footing for a long climb toward a better way of life.”
While poverty has declined significantly over the past half century, however, recent reports indicate that these programs simultaneously reduced the share of private income for America’s poorest, locking them into long-term dependency and limiting their ability to move up into the middle class.
A recent study by economists Kevin Corinth and Richard Burkhauser, which analyzed poverty rates before and after America embarked on the War on Poverty, concluded that, while poverty decreased substantially since 1964, this was achieved largely by welfare supplanting “market” income such as wages, investments and profits. In addition, before the 1960s, market income had succeeded in reducing poverty at similar rates to what the War on Poverty achieved.
“Our new research shows that the United States made strong progress in reducing poverty during the quarter century before the War on Poverty began, and that this progress was entirely accounted for by increases in market income, not government transfers,” Corinth told The Daily Signal. “In other words, there was a lot of benefit and not much cost during this earlier period.”
Before the War on Poverty, poverty reduction was achieved across racial groups. Economist Thomas Sowell wrote in 2004 that the poverty rate among black families fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, without government assistance.
According to Corinth and Burkhauser, “During that 1939–1963 period, it was the growth of market income rather than government transfers net of taxes that reduced poverty rates. In fact, poverty fell no faster in the 24 years after the War on Poverty was declared than in the 24 years before, even when applying the same initial poverty rate to both periods.”
And while some claim that government spending has reduced poverty by as much as 90% since 1964, it may have also built a barrier to upward mobility for America’s poorest.
A 2007 study of income mobility by the Internal Revenue Service that tracked individual earners (rather than income aggregates) found that Americans who occupied rich or poor income categories usually didn’t stay there long. The report found that between 1996 and 2005, 55% of taxpayers in the lowest income quintile had moved up to a higher group within 10 years.
Similarly, only 25% of those in the top (1/100 of one%) income category remained there a decade later. The IRS found similar results during the prior decade.
However, more recent studies indicate that income mobility is declining in America and that expansive welfare programs appear to be trapping more people in government dependence.
A January report by the Congressional Budget Office found that, for the poorest 20% of Americans, government payments increased from 26% of total income in 1979 to 42% in 2022. And as welfare programs expanded, market income for America’s poorest declined as a share of total income. Whereas in 1979 welfare payments were only about half the amount of private income sources for the lowest quintile, the two income sources were roughly equal by 2022.
According to a February report in The Daily Economy by analyst Tyler Turman, based on this Congressional Budget Office data, “despite historically unprecedented economic gains for low-income Americans, more of them are dependent on government assistance than at any point in the country’s history.”
The “welfare state’s perverse incentives” often discourage recipients from taking the steps that typically move Americans into higher income categories, such as pursuing higher-paying jobs, accumulating wealth and property, or getting married, Romina Boccia, director of entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, told The Daily Signal.
“Government anti-poverty programs have succeeded in alleviating material poverty by pushing low-income families above the poverty line, but they have done little to make them independent or self-sufficient to the point of not needing to relyon government assistance, which, ostensibly, was the entire goal of LBJ’s War on Poverty in the first place,” Boccia said. “Instead, they have merely created a growing share of Americans who rely on Washington more than their own wages.”
She cited a 2022 study from the University of Chicago and the Atlanta Fed regarding the penalties for welfare recipients who breach income thresholds. It showed that a family’s wage increase from $54,000 to $55,000 could cause them to lose more than $25,000 in childcare benefits.
“For working age adults and their children, dependency tends to make it more difficult to rise out of poverty through increases in their own earnings, because they are the most at risk or losing substantial amounts of government aid by doing so,” Corinth said.
If the goal of the War on Poverty was to boost Americans’ self-sufficiency, it appears to have fallen short. What it has achieved, rather, is a costly expansion of government, long-term dependency for the poor, and a perennial voting bloc for politicians who feed the addiction.
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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.
