I just wrote a check for spring softball. Travel team, not even the elite tier. $1,800 for the season. That's before equipment, tournament fees, gas to drive to Jersey three weekends a month, and the hotel if there's an overnight tournament.

Mia is 12. She's a good player. Not D1 scholarship good, just a kid who loves the sport. This is what it costs to let a kid play in Brooklyn in 2026.

I called my mom last weekend. She told me her mortgage payment in 1990 was $487 a month. Their house — a three-bedroom in Jersey with a yard — cost them $82,000 total. I'm spending $1,800 so my daughter can throw a ball for four months.

Something broke. Not recently. It broke a long time ago and we just got used to it.

My son Jake plays basketball and baseball. Sarah and I sat down last month and added it all up. Between two kids in three sports, we're spending over $8,000 a year on youth athletics. That doesn't include cleats that Jake outgrows every four months or the glove Mia needs because her hand finally grew. It doesn't include the gas or the snack bar money or the tournament weekends where you eat every meal at whatever's near the field.

Youth sports spending in the US hit $40 billion a year. That number has doubled since 2015. It hasn't doubled because kids are playing twice as much. It doubled because the dollar is worth half what it was, and every club and league and tournament operator knows parents will pay because the alternative is your kid sits home while their friends play.

I coach Jake's basketball team. The gym rental is $225 an hour. Twenty years ago the same gym was $40. The gym didn't get five times better. The dollars got five times weaker.

Every parent I know talks about this in the bleachers. Nobody connects it to monetary policy. It's always "everything is so expensive now" like it's weather. Like inflation just happens. It doesn't just happen. Somebody prints the money. Prices go up. Your kid's softball season costs more than a house payment used to.

Mia asked me last week why sports cost so much. I tried to explain inflation. She said "so they just make more dollars and everything costs more? That's dumb." She's 12 and she gets it better than most adults.

I bought bitcoin for the first time in 2020. Not because I understood the technology. Because I looked at what things cost for my family and realized that saving dollars was a game I couldn't win. Every year the pile buys less. Every year the registration fees go up. Every year the gap between what we earn and what two kids in sports actually costs gets wider.

21 million. That's it. Nobody's printing more bitcoin because youth sports got expensive. Nobody's diluting my savings because there's another "emergency." The math is fixed and the math is the point.

Mia doesn't know any of this yet. She just wants to play softball. Jake just wants to shoot hoops. It shouldn't cost this much to let your kids be kids.