THE DISSIDENT DAD DAILY – Nov. 14th - Vol.1
For fathers who refuse to hand their kids over to the Machine.
(Editor’s Note: This daily newsletter will go out free for the rest of November. On December 1st, it becomes a paid-subscriber feature. If it helps you see the world more clearly and lead your family more intentionally, consider upgrading to support the work.)
1. “Kids Are Now a Luxury Good,” Says America
A new American Family Survey finds 70% of Americans now say raising children is unaffordable—up 13 points in just one year. For the first time in the survey’s history, money is the number-one reason people cap their family size, beating every other excuse by a mile. Forty-three percent say “insufficient money” is why they’re not having more kids, while our national fertility rate sits at 1.6—below replacement.
The expert class reads this and shrugs. “Don’t worry,” they say, “we’ll pilot some tax credits and daycare subsidies, maybe nudge the birth rate a hair.” Meanwhile, the basic truth sits there, glaring: the supposed richest nation in history has quietly turned children into a luxury product. Families are being told, in practice, that the American Dream stops at one or two kids and a rented townhouse—if you can swing it.
2. Quarter of Households Living on the Edge
New data from the Bank of America Institute shows about 24% of U.S. households are now living paycheck to paycheck, up from 23% two years ago. The “good news,” we’re told, is that the growth of hardship is slowing. The bad news: lower-income families are sliding further behind, even as economists pat themselves on the back for “cooling inflation.”
Translation: a quarter of the country is one missed paycheck away from crisis, and the people running the show see that as an acceptable cost of doing business. You get rising food costs, rising housing costs, rising everything—except the one thing a dad actually needs to provide for his family: dependable, dignified income.
3. Court Smacks Down Ohio Pronoun Gag Rule
In Ohio, an appeals court just ruled that a school district’s pronoun policy violated the First Amendment. The district had essentially threatened kids with punishment if they dared use “biological pronouns” for classmates who identify otherwise. The court said no—you don’t get to rewire children’s speech by force and call it “anti-bullying.”
So while one arm of the Machine tells parents they’re overreacting about schools, another arm is literally trying to regulate how eleven-year-olds talk. Parents didn’t imagine this. They weren’t paranoid. They were right—and it took a federal court to admit it.
4. The Shutdown Ends, the Distrust Doesn’t
After 43 days, the federal government shutdown finally ended this week when Congress passed a funding bill and the president signed it. Economists warn the damage will linger: lost growth, shaken consumer confidence, and more proof that the people steering the economy can’t even keep their own lights on.
Families still had to pay mortgages, buy groceries, and show up to work while Washington play-acted collapse. The big lesson isn’t about one party or the other. It’s that the system you’re told to rely on is fragile, brittle, and willing to hold your paycheck hostage to score points on cable news.
5. Housing So Broken Millennials Are Forming House-Buying Car Pools
Fortune reports that millennials and Gen Z are increasingly co-buying homes with friends and extended family—not as some communal utopian dream, but because the housing market is so wrecked that a single young family often cannot qualify on its own. High rates, insane prices, and low inventory are forcing “co-ownership” arrangements just to get a roof that isn’t rented.
Remember when a married couple with kids could buy a modest starter home on one income? That wasn’t a fairy tale. That was normal life for our grandparents. Now, apparently, you need a small syndicate and a spreadsheet.
COMMENTARY
The Machine Is Pricing Out the Family On Purpose
Here’s what ties all of this together:
Kids are “too expensive,” according to 70% of Americans.
A quarter of households are living paycheck to paycheck.
Young families can’t buy homes without forming mini-corporations with their friends.
These aren’t isolated stories. This is a system telling you—quietly but very clearly—that family life is a luxury hobby, not the center of civilization.
When I talk to other dads, they all say some version of the same thing: “I’d love another kid, I’d love land, I’d love for my wife to be home more…but have you seen our grocery bill? Our rent? Our student loans?” And the culture’s answer is always the same shrug: Well, maybe don’t have so many kids. Maybe wait until you’re ‘financially ready’—sometime around age 40, if you’re lucky.
Meanwhile the experts write think-pieces asking why men are checked out, why women are burnt out, why birthrates are cratering, why everyone is lonely. As if they hadn’t just spent the last fifty years dismantling every support beam under family life—wages, housing, local community, faith—and replacing it with subscription services and pharmaceuticals.
Look at the incentives.
If you’re a government that wants compliant subjects, is it in your interest to have large, rooted families with a mom at home, a dad who can walk away from his job if it crosses moral lines, and grandparents living nearby? Or is it easier to govern atomized individuals who move every few years, rent everything, and are one HR complaint away from losing healthcare?
If you’re a corporation, do you want workers whose deepest loyalty is to their kids and parish and neighborhood—or workers whose deepest loyalty is to their stock-based compensation and the yoga-desk in the “collaboration hub”?
So long as we treat this as an accidental byproduct of “the market,” we’re lost. Markets don’t just appear; they’re built and steered. Policy choices made it normal for housing to be a speculative asset instead of shelter. Policy choices let wages stagnate while productivity and executive pay exploded. Policy choices decided that both parents should be in the workforce and that strangers would raise the kids, because GDP likes that arrangement.
What does that mean for us, practically, as dads?
First, we stop gaslighting ourselves. If you feel like it’s harder to raise a big, healthy family than it was for your grandparents, you’re not crazy. You’re seeing reality.
Second, we refuse the script that says, “Because it’s hard, you should give up.” The Machine would love for you to accept that kids are too expensive, that roots are impossible, that you belong on a treadmill of subscriptions and screen time until you die. Our job is to quietly, stubbornly, live another way.
That might mean downsizing the lifestyle to upsize the family. It might mean moving somewhere saner, or splitting a property with another family, or building side income that lets your wife step back from a job she hates. It definitely means tightening the bond between faith, marriage, children, and land—because that bundle is what the system is trying to dissolve.
Finally, we talk about this out loud. Not just as “personal finance tips,” but as what it really is: a spiritual and civilizational battle over whether the next generation even gets born—and, if they do, whether they belong to families or to the Machine.
They have their surveys and their models. We have our kids’ faces at the breakfast table. That’s the side I’m betting on.
Thanks for reading and God Bless,
Greg @ The Dissident Dad
