I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.

[Baron Scicluna]

Seriously Baron, no one wants your investment. You're a downer.

You sound like a Gannett editor writing a post-layoff column on repurposed Information Centers.

 

[Mr. Sunshine]

I think we can agree that coffee with cream and sugar sucks.

 

[Alma]

Maybe this should go in its own thread, but consider this: You have a guy with a high school diploma who was a B/C average in math and English but has a good work ethic and is willing to learn the basics of running your own business, and decides he may want to open a doughnut shop in town...

...he'll need $500,000 to open a Dunkin Donuts franchise!

I work with Dunkin Donuts franchisees every day, and you couldn't be more wrong, or more naive.

Here's the story of Dunkin Donuts in Chicago:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/61686

So many of the franchisees I work with started out as immigrants working as hourly employees, at low wages.

They proved themselves. They became managers. Then they became operating partners.

Family members have pooled money. They've gotten other family members involved. They save all of their money to open up the next franchise.

What about the family member who doesn't dream of saving up all his or her money to bake donuts, regardless of how much money they make doing it?

 

[SnarkShark]

The evolution of this thread, all the way to how much a coffee shop franchise costs, is pretty ridiculous.

 

[old_tony]

The evolution of this thread, all the way to how much a coffee shop franchise costs, is pretty ridiculous.

You some kind of creationist?

 

[ColdCat]

All right, you're just going to keep living in your world where discrimination doesn't exist anymore and everybody got the same chance coming here and no minority group's experience has been any different from any other minority group. Racism ended in 1964.

Lawsuit still going, BTW.

I just want to meet the white racist who refuses to work with African-Americans, but jumps at the chance to work with immigrant Indians and Pakistanis.

Do these people exist?

Would Robert Byrd have allowed Mr. Patel and Mr. Shah to join his chapter of the KKK so they could all work together to deny opportunities to African-Americans?

Are you being forking serious?

I think a bunch of Indians and Pakistanis would look out of place chanting "White Power". So, what white racists would embrace them?

Some KKK members were actually cool with Indians
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/20/151037079/the-artful-reinvention-of-klansman-asa-earl-carter
Or did you mean the other kind of Indians?

 

[SnarkShark]

The evolution of this thread, all the way to how much a coffee shop franchise costs, is pretty ridiculous.

You some kind of creationist?

I think Dunkin Donuts came on the third day. It's in the Arabian Coffee Scrolls.

 

[Gold]

Yeah, I don't care about that.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I know and fully acknowledge that a percentage of cops are assholes. Guys on power trips who want to play with guns. Thin line between cop and criminal for some.

And, as much as any profession, they protect their worst members.

All that said, the opinions of inner city African-Americans are not the only ones that need to be heard. Certainly they need to be heard. There should be a forum for their complaints to be voiced, and listened to.

But, it should be a dialogue.

If we want to solve problems, people need to talk to each other, not just at/past each other.

There's just too much mistrust between the two sides right now. A lot of it has been sown by police.

What makes you think Ferguson didn't have a meaningful conversation this week? When did a "forum" ever solve anything for the poor?

When has anything but the people themselves solved anything for the poor? The only people who escape poverty are those who recognize that it's up to them.

For 50 years now, everyone single person who waited for the government rescue them from poverty either died poor or is still living poor. The ones who escape poverty are the ones who recognize that it's up to them to stop doing the things that make people poor. So they stop skipping school. They study. They work hard. They get their education. They get a job, no matter how "demeaning" the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world tell them it is. They don't have babies they can't afford with men or women they aren't committed to. It's hard work, but they eventually get ahead. They get their college degrees. They get the better job, the better car, the better home. And then they get married or -- if they're already married to an equally committed, hard-working spouse -- they start having children and pass along that work ethic, that morality, that love of being educated that it takes to make their children grow into moral, hard-working adults.

Then we have the ones who think that a government check or a government program is what will magically get them out of poverty. They're still poor and they're still waiting. And, remarkably, they're still voting for the party that has kept them in their "waiting" chains.

How many trillions have we spent on the War on Poverty since LBJ declared "I'll have those n*****s voting Democrat for the next 200 years"?

Actually, and this is recorded, LBJ said the Civil Rights Act would give the Republicans the South for 25 years. That pretty much happened.

The politicans who are trying to stop minorities from voting since 2012 are pretty much exclusively Republicans.

Before the 1970s, there were segregationist Democrats but even some of those supported programs to help lower-income folks - who were also white.

From 1965 and through the 1970s, there were more African-Americans going to college and getting better jobs. LBJ's impetus to help the poor came from his experience teaching poor Mexicans in the 1930s.

The War on Poverty ended with Ronald Reagan, who instituted a War on Poor People. When Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers, that sent a message that things were completely favored large corporations.

The idea that marriage will help bring economic security is backward. People are more likely to get married when they feel more secure economically.

 

[Boom_70]

Regarding policies, income inequality -- and especially the rise of it -- is a huge one.

Come on, man. You're telling me that you believe a huge reason why African-Americans are disproportionately poor and undereducated is because ... people in the highest income brackets make so much?

That's one big reason the poor are poor. As the African-American community is disproportionately poor, it follows. The middle-class manufacturing jobs that used to be the way a good old uneducated boot-strapper built himself up, they don't exist anymore.

And, not to go all DW on you here, but your take is that those middle-class manufacturing jobs disappeared because the people in the highest income brackets started earning so much?

When you look for reasons of middle class jobs disappearing, look no further
than the NAFTA bill. Estimated that a million middle class jobs moved south to
lower wage Mexico.

Another damaging legacy of The Bush Family.

 

[X-Hack]

NAFTA was signed by Clinton

 

[Dick Whitman]

As delightful as I find the idea that the American inner-city is going to rise from the ashes on the backs of a Dunkin' Donuts on each corner, it's simply not a sustainable solution on any kind of large scale.

YankeeFan is making the mistake of confusing a solution for individuals with a solution for an entire population of the uneducated and impoverished. You give me enough time with most individuals, along with some background in teaching, and I can probably guide that person to some level of productivity within our society. But as presently constituted, our economy only has so many opportunities available.

Let's assume away every obstacle that might prevent someone from casually pooling together the family's $500,000 seed money. Let's assume that the economy can sustain 1,000 more Dunkin' Donuts. Or even 2,000. Great, 10,000 people, lifted from poverty. Only 50,214,000 to go, by my back-of-the-napkin calcualation.

Sustainability problems aren't confined the impoverished. A few years ago, every other rich kid in America was going to law school. Those who went to a high-ranked school received one of the hundred-plus six-figure jobs that corporate law firms were tossing around like so much parade candy in those days. Starting salaries rose from $70,000 to $160,000 in, not kidding here, like 10 years or less. Today, law school enrollment is plummeting. Like journalism, there just isn't enough work available to sustain the old numbers. Can you imagine if we ever get it right in America and figure out how wasteful litigation is, and start fixing the system?

The encourage-poor-people-to-open-a-Dunkin'-Donuts plan to solve American poverty might work for a finite number of receptive individuals and families. But it's not a magic bullet. Entrepreneurship isn't a magic bullet. And saying over and over again that people should take Personal Responsibility and become entrepreurial certainly isn't a magic bullet.

I know that completely dismantling the social safety net is every conservative's wettest, wildest dream. But if you really want to be part of the solution and not the problem, then you need to begin understanding that the impoverished, at this point, are simply not equipped to become entrepreneurs on the scale that would really change things, and the current economy is not equipped to facilitate their mass conversion from drug-dealing and prostitution to pastry-making.

 

[Dick Whitman]

NAFTA was signed by Clinton

Reagan, actually.