(Zero Hedge)—Amid the furious debate over the government shutdown and the incoming freeze of SNAP food benefits, one important factor is often overlooked – Why are 42 million Americans, a number larger than the entire population of Canada, dependent on government subsidized groceries? Isn’t this a time bomb waiting to explode regardless of a federal shutdown?
There have been a few temporary food stamp programs from the Great Depression through the 1950s, but they were limited in scale and funding was minimal. It wasn’t until LBJ’s “Great Society” project in 1964 that food stamps slowly became a permanent mainstay of American life. By 1969, food benefits were in full swing, yet, only 1.4% of the population used them. Strict eligibility requirements kept the participation rate down until 1977.
Candidates had to have a gross income below the poverty line. Their liquid assets (including vehicles) had to have limited value. They had to put some of their own money into a portion of the stamps in order to get the “bonus” stamps. Able bodied adults without children were largely excluded. College students and immigrants were barred from the program. Able bodied adults had to work or be in training. Monthly income and expense verification was required. Food stamps were paper, creating a “shame factor”. Just because someone was under the poverty line did not mean they could qualify.
Most of these barriers have been absent from SNAP in the past few decades, which is why the percentage of users spiked from 1.4% to as high as 15% of the population. Today, the rate stands at 12.5%, which is still extraordinarily high. Approximately 19 million SNAP users have been on the program for longer than a year, and over 80% of people on the program are able bodied and below retirement age.
In other words, the program has become a crutch for a vast number of people who do not need it.
This mother has
Seven kids ?
Seven different baby daddies
And she receives $3000 a month in EBT otherwise known as snap benefits ???She has no regrets.
This, is what we are paying for!
This, is why food prices have skyrocketed !!! pic.twitter.com/1CWzuz8v6G— AmyLouWho (@perseverare1776) October 28, 2025
The most common argument in favor of expanding food subsidies is: “What about the single moms?” Around 25% of all SNAP users are single mothers, and yes, it is increasingly difficult for these women to work full time without child care. However, while there are plenty of cases of desperate moms in need of a boost in times of hardship, there are also endless cases of abuse of the system.
This woman gets $3000 A MONTH for SNAP/EBT for her family of 8.
She wants to know if that makes you mad that the government is helping feed her children.
— KᗴᒪᒪᗴY ✰ (@Patriotmom717) October 29, 2025
The “EBT moms” problem is pervasive – Women who game the government (and the taxpayer) by deliberately having multiple children with multiple men and refusing to keep a father in the picture with the expectation that they will be able to live off a multitude of welfare programs. Many of these women live practically for free on the taxpayer’s dime; this was their life plan from the beginning.
She’s brags about getting $4,194 in SNAP/EBT money for the month of November because she “knows how to work the system into my favor”
Nah, this is wild pic.twitter.com/MRWbOd18VY
— TONY™ (@TONYxTWO) October 24, 2025
Food subsidies have had the unfortunate side effect of helping to destroy the nuclear family, creating generations of fatherless children and skyrocketing crime rates. Around 23% of all US households have single mothers.
Among black families, 47% are single mother households, 25% in Hispanic households and 12% in white households. Approximately 7% of white families use SNAP, while 27% of black families and 23% of Hispanic families use SNAP.
There is a clear trend here: Single mothers and minority families are the largest contingent of welfare beneficiaries per capita and the system is almost designed to reward their dependency.
Woman With 10 Kids Brags About Spending $2K On Groceries With WIC & EBT.
Here’s A Good Commerical To End The Welfare State In America For People Like This! pic.twitter.com/St6Gzdp34L
— Chad Prather (@WatchChad) July 12, 2025
This does not mean that SNAP needs to be shut down entirely – There are a lot of people out there in legitimate need. If the program was relegated to the elderly, the disabled, and short term support for people in emergencies, then the cost could be reduced dramatically. The fact that 80% of food stamp users are able bodied and under 60 years of age is mind boggling. Not to mention the 1.8 million non-citizens that took SNAP in 2024 (the same people that “don’t exist” according to Democrats).
The solution is to end the idea that food stamps need to act as a permanent safety net or entitlement program. Instead, they should be treated as a short term stop-gap until citizens in need can get back on their feet.
Work requirements, reduced funding for young and able bodied participants, making people pay a deposit on EBT before they get access to benefits, and limiting the number of children a parent can claim in exchange for SNAP could not only change the landscape of government spending, it could also dramatically reduce a number of social problems associated with single mother households. Take away easy access to SNAP, and watch the number of single mothers plummet.
As for the overall population, The US spends over $100 billion annually on food subsidies, the largest food welfare program of any nation in the world. No other single country comes close. Perhaps greater attention needs to be paid to who qualifies for this program, with far more requirements and obstacles in place.
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.