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Well, your friend "Sunny Hostin" from The View is at it again.

The last (and I think only) time I wrote about her, she was calling the governor of Florida "DeathSantis," even though Florida's excess death rate throughout Covid was better than California's.

But don't ask her about any of that, because she also said: "I like Gavin Newsom because he's really pretty to look at."

And who can forget when Hostin, a proponent of reparations for slavery, discovered while on a PBS program that she was herself descended from slaveholders in Spain?

Well, now she's told the world, "I think it's really reckless to be suggesting that people have children" because of the affordability crisis right now. She said you need $400,000 for child care, by which I assume she means you need to earn $400,000 a year to be able to afford child care.

We'll get to that child care claim in a minute. But by Hostin's standard, there has never been a good time in human history to have children. And yet here we all are.

The average American family today enjoys indoor plumbing, refrigeration, smartphones, cars, and grocery stores stocked with food from around the globe. Infant mortality is a fraction of what it was even in the 1950s.

If "affordability" in absolute terms is the test, even the 19th century would have been an impossible time to have children, since virtually none of the comforts practically everyone demands today were available at any price, "affordable" or not.

Even during the Great Depression the United States did not see birth rates at the current below-replacement level (1.7 Total Fertility Rate).

The affordability crisis is almost entirely self-inflicted, and could be substantially minimized by repealing bad policy and/or reining in the Federal Reserve. That's certainly true of housing, as I've discussed on the Tom Woods Show, and you would be flabbergasted at the regulatory thicket surrounding child care and who is allowed to do what, all of which makes care more expensive.

Better than "child care" (warning: I am about to say the unsayable) is for the mother to stay home with the children.

According to national data, full-time child care at a center for one infant or toddler is at $10,000 to $15,000+ annually in many areas (sometimes 8 to 16 percent or more of median family income for one child; far higher as a share for lower earners). For two kids, costs can hit $20,000, sometimes even $28,000 and above.

Then, after taxes, commuting, work clothes, meals out, and the second earner's foregone home production (meals, cleaning, etc.), the net addition to household resources from formal child care shrinks dramatically, sometimes to just a few thousand dollars a year, or even negative once you factor in the effects of tax policy.

If people raised children without electricity, without modern sanitation or transportation, and with zero financial cushion to speak of, we can do it, too, if we're serious and work hard at it.

What's "reckless" is discouraging childbirth at a time of catastrophically falling birth rates, a problem that leads to a long list of subsidiary problems for civilization itself.

I think the subject matter here justifies another baby picture: here's Henry Woods, Woods child #6, just over three months old (this is from my wife's social media):
So don't listen to the ghouls who would urge you to postpone or bypass one of the great things about being alive.

Sit down and figure out how to make it work. If you can't make it work in 2026, nobody could ever have made it work.

For that matter, join my School of Life; if there's anyone on earth who can help you navigate 2026, it's those people.

Waiting for the perfect time is a recipe for permanent postponement. There will always be reasons not to do it. Look them in the face and decide if they're real, or phantoms. And then go ahead and do what civilization needs -- and what you need, whether you know it or not.

Let me end with this:

For my print newsletter I interviewed my eldest daughter, Regina, around the time she turned 21.

She's a beautiful soul, and I hope our conversation makes it even clearer what a gift having children is.

I never make material from the print newsletter available online, but I made an exception for this one. Click and enjoy:
 
Tom Woods

P.S. This afternoon begins the masterclass series I told you about on being an effective public speaker; if you can master a skill that terrifies the rest of mankind, I assure you that many benefits you cannot even fathom today will accrue to you. Costs nothing, so register here and check it out: https://www.tomwoods.com/speaking






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Tom Woods · PO Box 701447 · Saint Cloud, FL 34770 · USA