Also, you're paying 3-6 airfares when you travel, and you have to worry about education expenses. Even though there are great public schools, those are expensive when one considers that they're priced into the housing market. Then there's college (especially admissions and the attendant dark tuition, which are more terrifying than tuition because dark tuition-- elite high schools, counselors with connections, bullshit "internships" on bought strings-- can run into the half-million range). I'm terrified of how competitive college admissions are going to be in 25 years, especially because going to an elite school matters far more than it used to. (There are plenty of 50-year-old CEOs who went to state schools; these days, kids from Yale can't get VC.)

Personally, I think our society is unintentionally de-eugenicizing itself. If you're smart and thoughtful, having kids is a terrifying idea. The meltdown of the middle and upper-middle class is causing the most thoughtful people to choose not to have children (can anyone, excluding billionaires, make a confident bet 20+ years into the future?) and it'll be interesting to see what this does to the aggregate IQ level of our society. Free higher education (for the qualified) has all sorts of benefits, but one among them that is enormous (if not politically correct) is that it removes one of the major factors that impels smart people to reproduce less.