(Just The News)—It’s been 17 years since the federal minimum wage was raised, though that could soon change if U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, has his way.
The junior senator from the Grand Canyon State rolled out his plan to bankroll the first wage increase since 2009, with his 32-page “Saving the Middle Class and Restoring the American Dream” middle-class jobs plan coming out this week. Gallego is proposing to raise the minimum wage gradually in phases starting in 2027. By 2030, the wage would be $20 an hour. The current rate is $7.25 under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
But critics warn the wage hike could end up in losses of jobs in a world where customers are already placing their orders at kiosks at McDonald’s.
According to an estimate from a conservative nonprofit research organization, the Employment Policies Institute, Gallego’s plan would cut 2.3 million jobs nationally. The institute noted California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $20 fast food minimum wage, which the Legislature passed, cost the state thousands of jobs. The state’s minimum wage for other jobs is $16.90 an hour, although the wage is higher for certain healthcare workers. The minimum wage in the city of Los Angeles rose on July 1 to $18.42 an hour.
Gallego is arguing that people need to earn at least $20 an hour to meet the growing cost of living. His plan projects that raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour would raise Arizonans’ annual wages by just over $2,400.
While Gallego’s team did not make the Phoenix native available for an interview with The Center Square before deadline, he did discuss it on NBC News over the weekend.
“I always felt like, you know, if I put 40 hours’ worth of honest work together, I would have enough to support my family, and then feel comfortable enough to go to a movie,” he told NBC News. “That’s not happening anymore, and so that’s the most important focus of this plan.”
Gallego’s plan has drawn an immediate reaction from the state he represents in the nation’s capital.
Among those is Danny Seiden, CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
During an interview with The Center Square, Seiden said Gallego’s plan, which would also impose a 10% excise tax on data center gross receipts and end all tax deductions for data centers to pay for the raise, is misguided.
“I think the market is much better suited to do this than a politician in Washington, D.C.,” Seiden told The Center Square. “And I think the market would tell you there’s actually been labor shortages, and they’re way above minimum wage. There are all kinds of special signing bonuses paid trying to get these workers trained.”
Gallego’s proposal also has drawn heavy skepticism from people like Jon Riches, vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix.
Riches told The Center Square that attempts to raise the minimum wage typically have the opposite effect on workers, driving up unemployment rates and depreciating wages in the long run.
Others, such as Mike Huckins of the Greater Phoenix Chamber, see Gallego’s proposal as well-intended but ultimately fruitless. He told The Center Square the senator’s plan would do more harm than good.
“We can raise living standards without closing the door on entry-level workers, because they’re the ones that are most likely going to get hurt by those kinds of policies,” said Huckins, the chamber’s senior vice president of public affairs and information technology operations. “So, we think the better path better path on this is to improve skills, improve housing, improve childcare – all those things that right now are a little bit of a barrier to getting people to work and to advancing their careers.
Growing union membership
Another key part of Gallego’s plan is to triple union membership by 2035 by automatically certifying a union with more than 50% of workers who have signed authorization cards and expanding opportunities for entering union career fields.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Arizona’s unionized employee rate (4.1%) was the tied with Idaho for the sixth lowest rate nationally in 2025, ahead of Utah (3.8%), South Carolina (2.7%), Arkansas (2.8%) North Carolina (2.5%) and South Dakota (2.3% each).
Longtime economics scholars, such as Kelvin Wong, a clinical associate professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, understand where Gallego’s proposal is coming from.
Still, even with Arizona’s unionized labor force near the bottom of the pack nationally, analysts such as Wong believe that such a decision could lead to a wave of unintended consequences.
“From an economics standpoint, the minimum wage kind of has trade-offs,” Wong told The Center Square. “You have the fairness issue, where you are helpful to people that are earning low wages, and you can provide a better, living wage for them.”
The trade-off is a loss of jobs, Wong said.
Where Arizona stands
Right now, Arizona’s $15.15 minimum wage ranks 10th nationally, more than double the federal standard, according to Common Sense Institute of Arizona’s 2026 Job Killers Report. That standard is tied to the Consumer Price Index, meaning the wage standards increase as inflation does.
Katie Ratlief, the institute’s executive director, said the report’s findings make it clear that wage hikes hurt, more than help, the average worker.
“I think minimum wage issues in Arizona are often passed at the ballot box, and they pass because people want their neighbors and their kids and their friends to have jobs where they can make enough money to afford to live and achieve the American dream,” Ratlief told The Center Square. “That makes complete sense.
“The problem is when you’re setting wage policy at the ballot box, or in this case, even worse, out of Washington, D.C., there will be collateral damage and that damage, generally, ends up being entry level workers, teenagers and people who are just trying to get on that first rung of the economic ladder,” Ratlief said.
Economists like Wong see the appeal of using the bully pulpit as a way to drag salaries back in line with inflation, especially in an election year. He also cited the fact that roughly 1% of Arizona workers, per his estimate, are currently making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, meaning the impact might be intangible for most workers.
“I do think it makes sense for politicians to propose ways that kind of say, ‘Hey, we’re looking out for you, and here’s how we’re going to do that – by suggesting a raise in the federal minimum wage’,” Wong said. “So, to me, it seems like a good strategy, and addressing that is a huge issue right now in this country.”
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.
