California’s family-owned enterprises have clung to survival through decades of stifling regulations, soaring energy costs, and an bureaucracy that views entrepreneurs as adversaries rather than vital contributors to the state’s fabric. Now, billionaire activist Tom Steyer proposes to strip away their last meaningful shield: the property tax protections of Proposition 13.
What he frames as closing a “corporate loophole” would function in practice as a wrecking ball aimed squarely at the modest storefronts and generational operations that define communities from the Santa Cruz Mountains to Los Angeles boulevards.
This is not merely another tax adjustment in a high-tax state. It represents the logical endpoint of progressive governance in California—a system that punishes those who build and rewards those who consolidate. Steyer’s plan to force reassessments of commercial properties at current market values would trigger massive tax hikes for owners who purchased decades ago, often at a fraction of today’s inflated prices. The result? An acceleration of the very corporate consolidation he claims to oppose.
Consider the iconic restaurant nestled in the redwood country off Highway 9, its 1912 structure a gathering place for generations. Or the family Mexican eatery in Los Angeles operating since 1925, its walls lined with history. These are not faceless assets; they are living legacies sustained by owners who have navigated overlapping rules from multiple government layers while competing against deep-pocketed chains.
Proposition 13’s 1 percent cap, with modest annual increases, has been their quiet lifeline. Remove it, and the math turns lethal.
Steyer, who built his fortune before turning to climate activism and Democratic politics, positions himself as the champion of working Californians. Yet his solution to affordability involves extracting more from the productive class that remains in the state.
The deception lies in the rhetoric: this is no targeted strike against “the wealthy.” It targets the commercial real estate base that underpins independent enterprises, many of them far from extravagant. A modest building on a modest lot, passed down through families who have poured heart and sweat into it, suddenly bears the tax burden of Silicon Valley-adjacent valuations.
The irony runs deep. Progressives decry corporate power while crafting rules that make it easier for hedge funds and multinationals to swallow the competition. A local plumber who once fixed issues affordably now operates under new ownership, complete with tablets, waivers, and mandated replacements that inflate costs. Veterinarians become salaried employees following templates.
The pattern repeats across trades. Steyer’s tax shift would hasten this transfer of wealth and control away from families rooted in California soil toward distant financial interests.
California’s regulatory thicket already demands human resources specialists, environmental consultants, and attorneys that small operators cannot sustain. Add a property tax spike of tenfold or more, layered atop electric vehicle mandates and other green dictates, and the perfect storm arrives. Owners who have endured years of exhaustion simply cannot compete. They exit, benefits in hand from the very system that devoured their life’s work. The corporate survivors raise prices to cover their “fair share” and thrive in the resulting vacuum.
This dynamic exposes the contradiction at the heart of modern progressivism. What begins as rhetoric against inequality delivers outcomes that concentrate economic power. The state pioneers policies that sound compassionate but function as barriers to entry for the little guy. Corporate chains adapt. Legacy businesses, built on personal investment rather than leveraged balance sheets, do not.
Steyer’s candidacy, backed by immense self-funding, highlights the state’s drift. Promises of more housing and lower utility bills ring hollow when paired with measures that undermine the economic base capable of delivering them. Californians have watched businesses flee or consolidate. This proposal risks making that trend irreversible for the historic heart of the state’s commerce.
In the end, the question remains whether voters will recognize the assault for what it is: not reform, but replacement. The families who built California’s character through their enterprises deserve better than to become collateral damage in a billionaire’s vision of governance.
As Scripture reminds us in the Book of James, “But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” Policies that masquerade as justice while crushing the diligent call for discernment and a return to principles that honor honest labor and stewardship.
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.
