I was using USDA figures for median food costs, do you have a better source? And I did not say to buy them a car, I was giving the median cost of single vehicle ownership for the whole family (which factors in purchasing, licensing, insuring, maintaining, and fueling the vehicle). These are median numbers.

This is not the 1940s:

Cheap homes are unavailable. Even single family homes are becoming unaffordable except in isolated areas without jobs. Housing costs, even apartments, have gone up enormously as a percentage of income and building/health codes don’t allow you to live in shanties.

You need a phone now for most jobs. People aren’t hiring you if you can’t be contacted except for bottom of the barrel work. You likely need internet if your job requires remote work and kids probably need it for homework.

People in the mid 1900s had single earner households and households or neighborhoods with extended family. That means more time for cooking, sewing and repairing clothes, and other housework. Work often wasn’t as far away, especially in working class neighborhoods, so you might not even need a car.

Besides all this, literally nobody is going to have kids if it requires going back to a 1940s standard of living. That’s society’s problem, if as an aggregate entity it cares about perpetuating itself. If nobody cares, fine, let it fall apart.

> I was using USDA figures for median food costs

Median people in the USA eat extremely lavishly. Your series of comments, to me, boils down to a complaint that you can't maintain this extreme luxury while having children. Yeah, nobody ever could. The time frame in which people were "able" to have a lot of children was the time when they weren't living such extravagant lives of consumption. So yeah if the complaint is "Why can't I afford a lifestyle that would make my grandparents blush with shame at its luxury, and have as many kids as them, wtf?!" then I'm not very sympathetic to it.