THE DISSIDENT DAD DAILY – Nov. 18th - Vol.3
Kids are not a luxury good. They’re the point.
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The “Inflation Hangover” That Never Ends
Primerica just dropped a special report on how middle-income families are navigating what they literally call the “inflation hangover.” Short version: the charts look better, real life doesn’t.
Using their Household Budget Index, they show that families making $30k–$130k are still getting hammered on basics, even though headline inflation “slowed.” Essentials like food, utilities, and transportation are still eating a bigger chunk of the paycheck, and people are plugging the gap with credit cards and cutting long-term savings.
So while the political class brags about getting prices “back to normal,” the actual report describes families stretched thin, living closer to the edge, and losing margin for emergencies. The regime broke the cost of living, then redefined “normal” downward and expects you to clap in applause.
Housing Costs Are Killing Birthrates
Today’s “no kidding” news item.
A new analysis covered by MortgagePoint puts real numbers on something you and I have felt for years. Rising housing costs are a major cause of declining fertility in the U.S. The paper looks at decades of data and finds that as housing prices climb, fertility drops. Not “kind of associated.” The researcher flat out concludes rising housing costs are “a major cause of declining fertility,” especially among younger adults delaying marriage and kids.
In 1990, fertility was about 2.08 kids per woman. Now it’s around 1.6, record lows. Same country, same people, different housing regime. You price out starter homes, you get fewer families and fewer children, period. The kicker? The author notes that if housing policy is family policy, we should be building the kinds of homes families actually want, not more micro-boxes and “amenity-rich” apartments.
You don’t say.
San Diego Judge: You Can’t Just Hide Kids From Their Parents
In Escondido, California, a federal judge just signaled he’s siding with parents and teachers against a school district’s gender-identity secrecy policy. The policy barred teachers from telling parents if their child was socially transitioning at school unless the student gave explicit permission.
Courthouse News reports that during a key hearing, the judge was openly skeptical of the district’s stance and indicated he is likely to find the policy unconstitutional. The case, Mirabelli v. Olson, was brought by Christian teachers who argued they were being forced to lie to parents about their own kids.
Think about the mentality required to write a policy like that. You have to believe the school owns the “real” version of the child, and parents are some secondary, potentially dangerous audience who must be managed. The judge hasn’t issued the final ruling yet, but if he follows through, it’s a serious blow to the machine’s dream of cutting parents out of their kids’ inner lives.
Social Media Finally Facing A Jury Over What It Did To Kids
Out in Los Angeles, Courthouse News has a piece on the first big trial in the social-media-addiction mess. A California judge rejected summary judgment motions from Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. That means a jury is going to hear arguments that these platforms knowingly designed their products to hook kids and helped fuel a youth mental-health crisis.
This isn’t abstract. The suits argue that features like endless scroll, push notifications, “streaks,” and algorithmic recommendation weren’t innocent design choices. They were engineered gambling mechanisms aimed at developing brains. Behind that you’ve got thousands of families saying: my kid’s depression, self-harm, eating disorder, or even suicide is tied directly to being farmed for engagement on these apps.
Win or lose, the fact that these companies have to sit in a courtroom and listen to parents and experts spell this out in plain language is… overdue.
South Carolina Floats What Could Be The Harshest Abortion Bill In America
ABC reports that a small group of South Carolina senators is considering a bill that would ban nearly all abortions, with penalties that could send women and anyone who helps them to prison for decades. The proposal appears to outlaw some forms of contraception that prevent implantation and could chill even giving information about legal abortion elsewhere.
I am fully pro-life, womb to tomb. No debate there. But if you hand a clumsy state this kind of power, with vague wording and massive sentences, you are trusting the same people who can barely fix a pothole to navigate impossible moral edge cases with a prison ledger. The goal is to protect children and uphold moral order, not create another machine that treats broken women as raw material for punishment.
Pennsylvania District Tries To Bully A Homeschool Dad. It Backfires.
The Washington Examiner has a story on a Pennsylvania school district that decided a homeschooling father was basically a truant criminal. The district slapped the family with notices and threats, claiming they were not in compliance, even though the dad followed state law. After he lawyered up and pushed back, the district folded and acknowledged what it should have known from day one: homeschooling is a lawful exercise of parental authority, not some shady loophole.
This is how it usually works. Bureaucrats test the fence. If you do not know your rights, they keep pushing. If you stand up, suddenly everyone “misunderstood the statute.” Homeschooling is not a favor from the state. It is parents doing the job they were given by God.
Supreme Court Takes A Trump-Era Asylum Rule That Could Shape The Border Fight
Reuters reports that the Supreme Court has agreed to review a Trump administration rule that limited which asylum claims could be processed at the southern border. The policy required many migrants to first seek protection in another country before applying in the United States. Lower courts struck it down. Now the high court will decide how much power the federal government has to narrow asylum processing.
On paper it is a technical fight over administrative law. In real life it is about whether this country is allowed to have a real border or whether every crossing can be laundered through magic words and lawyer games. Families in border towns, and families living with the downstream chaos everywhere else, have more at stake in this than any think-tank fellow.
Commentary
Kids Are Not A Luxury Good
There’s a line I keep seeing pop up in the news: “People just can’t afford kids anymore.”
You’ll see some expert in a nice blazer calmly explain that, actually, it’s rational to have one or zero kids when housing is sky-high, when both parents have to work forever, when daycare costs more than a mortgage. And on one narrow level, sure, he’s right. Inside this machine, large families do look insane.
But that’s the point. The system has been tuned so that having three, four, five kids feels reckless, not normal. It wants you to feel like the responsible move is to shrink your bloodline down to one cautious, optimized child. Maybe none.
Look around. Housing is structured so you pay top dollar for a box in a dense metro, with no yard and no margin. Wages are structured so you need two adults working just to service debt and keep up with rising costs. The tax code treats you like a unit in a spreadsheet, not the root of a future people. Then the same people who built that architecture act mystified when fertility tanks.
“Must be vibes. Young people just don’t want kids.” Right.
On top of that, every part of the culture that used to celebrate big families has been mocked into the ground. The mom of five is “irresponsible,” the dad of seven is “controlling,” or the couple marrying at 22 is “throwing their life away.” Meanwhile the single thirty-something with a dog and a passport collection is “living fully.” The script is obvious: don’t plant, don’t root, don’t multiply. Drift.
And while they make kids feel unaffordable, they make them incredibly profitable.
Your child, if you do have one, is instantly a target. Schools, apps, streaming platforms, drug companies, all circling. Not to help you raise a saint, but to capture a user, a patient, a lifetime customer. If they can nudge that kid away from you spiritually, intellectually, sexually, that’s a bonus. One less loyalty to compete with.
This is why I keep hammering “eternalist generationalism.” If you accept their framing, then yeah, you probably “can’t afford” children. You definitely can’t afford a tribe of them. If you accept their framing, kids are a consumer choice, like a car trim level. Maybe you upgrade later if conditions improve.
But if your horizon is eternity and great-grandchildren, the calculus flips. Kids aren’t luxuries. They’re the whole point. The house, the land, the work, the struggles with money, the hard days… all of that is background noise compared to the simple fact that you are standing in a long line of people and you get to decide whether that line flickers out or burns hotter.
So yes, the cost of living is rigged against big families. Yes, the culture is hostile. Yes, there are nights you lie awake doing math and it doesn’t pencil out.
Have kids anyway. Have more than “makes sense.” Put your energy into building a household, a parish, a patch of ground where children are seen as the wealth, not the liability. Refuse the script that treats your future descendants like a lifestyle accessory.
The machine wants fewer human beings and more obedient users. A dissident dad does the opposite.
Thanks for reading and God Bless,
Greg @ The Dissident Dad
