I own and rent out 25 mom-and-pop storefronts in Lakewood, Ohio, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. About 20% of my tenants are immigrants. I sell them the American dream—a chance to run their own business—and they sell beer, cigarettes, used furniture, and services like dry cleaning and haircuts. The stores are street-level with apartments above, like Disneyland’s Main Street, except no Mickey. The mice are real.

I rarely hard-sell foreigners to rent. They’re gung-ho from the get-go. American-born prospects, on the other hand, often need hand-holding. I sit with potential American tenants in diner booths and deliver my mini-lecture on happiness and business, mostly cribbed from Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.

In his 2006 book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” Mr. Gilbert writes: “Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.” I emphasize the “grasping profitable business opportunities” part.

If a store succeeds, it sticks around—10 years, sometimes 20 years. I’ve rented to a bar for 37 years. But there are many one-and-done stores. Gone in a year.

I rented to an immigrant from India whose Indian Food Emporium didn’t bring her happiness or money. Very few customers bought her basmati rice, turmeric and lentils. So she switched to beer, wine, cigarettes and lottery tickets—which worked. The store’s signage went from curlicue Hindi-esque lettering to skid-row neon almost overnight: “Bud Light,” “Lottery” and “Open.” The neon signs made it more difficult for me to rent the upstairs apartments to quality tenants. (“Quality tenants” means, in this case, residents who don’t need beer at 2 a.m. but need a good night’s sleep to get up for work on time.) Ultimately the Indian woman and her husband closed the minimart and opened an Indian restaurant two blocks away. That restaurant succeeded. Locals would eat Indian food, just not cook it.

In a few weeks, Dragana, a registered nurse from Serbia, is shutting down her resale furniture store after a year’s run. She works the night shift at a nursing home and pays $1,950 a month in rent for 1,850 square feet. That comes to $13 a square foot. Retail space doesn’t get much cheaper than that. (In Manhattan, retail space averages $653 a square foot.) Dragana wrote me, “We stop to invest two months ago and our sales are slower and almost next to nothing. I know that is not your problem but I wish you to understand.” I understand. Retail is a crapshoot.

Here’s what works in retail: bars, hair salons and dry cleaning. Al—whose real name is Abdullah—is an Iraqi who owns a barbershop called A Haircut Above. (The name “A Cut Above” was taken.) Al’s youngest son often plays in the store. Kids hang out in immigrants’ stores. I’ve rented to a Korean dry cleaner for 11 years. Now the eldest daughter is at Duke University studying public policy, and the son is at Bard doing computer science. I told the mom, “Tell your son to take a course from Walter Russell Mead before he graduates.” She wrote that down. I give free assimilation advice.

Besides immigrants, another subcategory of mine is hipster retail. This is a thing now, and not only on the coasts and in college towns. I rent to Cle Couture, a women’s clothing boutique, and to Beat Cycles—a bike store started by an English major who likes Kerouac. And I lease a store to a tattoo shop that is also an art gallery. Cool.

Immigrants don’t do cool. They do drudgery. Although immigrants’ kids sometimes do cool. Enri, a 20-something Albanian-American, wanted to open a streetwear store. Streetwear is oversize hoodies, tennis shoes and graphic T-shirts. He got his father, a valet parker, to cosign the lease. Enri painted the walls black and wanted to turn the floor black, too. He never got to the floor. He never got any merchandise, either. He ran out of credit, I think.

His father wasn’t much help. Enri said, “My father is an extremist.” No, Enri, your father is a realist.

What was the point of that?

What was the point of that?

What was the point of that?

Honestly, that is rare. Normally the op-eds are from well known politicians, academics, or media commentators. Alongside that article is one from John Boehner and another from Kevin McCarthy. That reads more like a long letter to the editor.

Op-eds are too partisan to add much value. Most are just confirmation bias.

Republicans will accomplish these goals using the same collaborative leadership style that produced our past successes.

yup. they're equally bad as the jewish slumlord musician from cleveland.

Loved this sentence from Kevin McCarthy's op-ed today:

alllrighty!

Americans love to hate millennials, so maybe it was inevitable that someone would invent a board game to, er, celebrate their enthusiasms. The toy company Hasbro has released a new take on its classic board game, and Monopoly for Millennials is fun for the whole socialist family this holiday season.

“Forget real estate. You can’t afford it anyway,” the game’s box proclaims. Players instead acquire experiences. In true hipster fashion, being the first to discover a new vegan bistro or meditation retreat wins points. Game pieces include emojis, and Rich Uncle Pennybags takes selfies and gets a makeover with sunglasses.

Millennial moaning about the game has helped it go viral. “The rules are simple, you start with no money, you can’t afford anything, the board is on fire for some reason and everything is your fault,” quipped Aaron Gillies, author of “How to Survive the End of the World (When It’s In Your Own Head): An Anxiety Survival Guide.”

Emily Roehler, a millennial meteorologist at Fox’s Colorado Springs affiliate, tweeted that she hopes Hasbro would “be donating the proceeds to student debt relief. (which is why millennials can’t afford real estate).”

And in the inevitable piece from the left-wing scolds at Vox, Rachel Sugar called the game “a tired joke, a joke we have been telling, without addressing the grim reality behind the joke, for well over a decade now.” Talk about proving the point of the jokes about millennials.

Hasbro’s take is #onpoint. Millennials aged 25 to 34 have an average $42,000 in debt, Northwestern Mutual found this year. More than Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, millennials spend their money on events, activities and travel instead of goods or houses, McKinsey reported last year. If they’d kept pace with these two earlier generations, 3.7 million more millennials would own homes, the Urban Institute found last summer.

Some 51% of American adults under 30 harbor positive views about socialism, Gallup found in August. So Hasbro deserves credit for offering a lesson in Capitalism 101.

When Monopoly for Millennials hit the shelves this month, it sold for less than $20. But as the game gained attention, it briefly sold out, and now it won’t leave the Walmart shelf for less than $75. So as millennials pass go, they may notice there is money to be made when supply meets demand.

Perhaps the experience will even pique new interest in economics and entrepreneurship. Someone has to pay for the baby boomer entitlements that progressive millennial pundits are working so hard to expand.

Hasbro’s take is #onpoint. Millennials aged 25 to 34 have an average $42,000 in debt, Northwestern Mutual found this year. More than Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, millennials spend their money on events, activities and travel instead of goods or houses, McKinsey reported last year. If they’d kept pace with these two earlier generations, 3.7 million more millennials would own homes, the Urban Institute found last summer.

I'll include WSJ Editorials as well since they're usually terrible as well.

:lol:

Not far off. Though any Peggy Noonan op-ed is its own bizarro category. I have no idea what planet she lives on.

I like Peggy Noonan. The rest of the WSJ crew are absolutely nuts.

President Trump and his wife Melania made a surprise visit to American soldiers in Iraq on Wednesday, and you would think that would be a straightforward event to write up. Report how and when he arrived, whom he visited, and what he and some of the soldiers said. These holiday trips have become a ritual for all Presidents, and the troops appreciate the Commander in Chief’s display of support.

Yet here are the first two paragraphs of the news dispatch on the Trump visit that the Washington Post published on its website Wednesday afternoon, Washington time:

“President Trump touched down Wednesday in Iraq in his first visit to a conflict zone as commander in chief, a week after announcing a victory over the Islamic State that his own Pentagon and State Department days earlier said remained incomplete.

“The president’s visit to Al Asad Air Base west of Baghdad, which was shrouded in secrecy, follows months of public pressure for him to spend time with troops deployed to conflicts in the Middle East and punctuates the biggest week of turmoil the Pentagon has faced during his presidency.”

We’ll admit we stopped reading there, so perhaps there was actual news later in the story. But can anyone reading those opening two sentences wonder why millions of Americans believe Donald Trump when he tells them that he can’t get a fair shake from the press?

These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings.

The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.

Normal People think the Editorial Page is a good place to write about fakeNews.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-constant-spin-zone-11545870180

Whining about the Washington Post on their editorial page!

YUP

President Trump’s recent blowup over General Motors layoffs was largely misdirected, though it may spur at least one good policy result. Killing subsidies for electric cars and trucks would be a victory for taxpayers, the federal fisc and the car industry.

Mr. Trump’s initial response to GM’s plant closure news was to threaten to punish the company by stripping its federal subsidies. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow later acknowledged that Mr. Trump can’t legally single out GM for subsidy retribution. Instead the White House may take the better route of proposing to eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles, in particular the $7,500 consumer tax credit for battery-powered cars.

That handout began as part of the Obama 2009 “stimulus,” and as always supporters said it would be temporary. A decade on, GM, Nissan and Tesla are nearing or exceeding the 200,000-per-manufacturer cap on EV sales that qualify for the full credit. So they are now seeking increases in the cap, joined by other car makers and Democrats preaching climate alarm.

The credits are a classic middle-class-to-rich income transfer. EV batteries are expensive, which means the average starting price for electric cars is around $42,000. That’s some $8,000 more than the average price of a new vehicle, and $22,000 more than the average price of a new gasoline-powered small car.

Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute looked at 2014 IRS data and found that 79% of federal EV tax credits were claimed by households with adjusted gross income of more than $100,000. Only 1% of EV buyers earned less than $50,000.

Some states and localities also hand out EV breaks, allowing consumers to reap up to $15,000 (California) or $10,500 (Connecticut) per car. This means the federal program is also a geographic wealth transfer, benefiting mainly wealthy coastal havens. The latest sales data from August shows that 53% of EV sales were in California. The subsidy will cost some $2 billion through fiscal 2019. And taxpayers will also have shelled out another $5.5 billion directly to car makers in federal grants and loans for manufacturing and technology programs by 2019, according to the Winegarden data.

Yet this largesse has not changed the economics of the electric car market. Despite advances in EV technology and all of this government support, most auto makers sell their electric vehicles at a loss. A 2016 Bloomberg News story reported that GM could lose as much as $9,000 on every Chevrolet Bolt.

Automakers stick with these EV losers because nearly a dozen states have adopted mandates requiring that EVs make up a certain percentage of all vehicle sales. Even then, most consumers need coaxing to buy. When Georgia ended its $5,000 state tax credit in 2015, sales of electric vehicles fell 89% in two months. EVs have been on the market since 2010 and are still only about 0.5% of total vehicle sales.

Auto makers worry that without federal subsidies the state EV mandates may make EV production financially ruinous. But then states should end the mandates, or they can pick up the federal $7,500 tab.

As for climate change, studies show that total CO2 emissions from EV cars can even exceed those of conventional gas vehicles—depending on what fuel is producing the electricity to charge the batteries (coal) and how long a car battery charge lasts.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said this month that the White House will “seriously consider” ending EV subsidies in its next budget, and that could be useful policy leverage with House Democrats. If electric cars are the future, let them earn that success in an unsubsidized marketplace.

WSJ Editorial Board is occassionaly a good read when they stop taking their psycho pills.

In the daily headlines, the government shutdown—now the longest in American history—is reported as a clash between two uncompromising forces: President Trump and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In this battle, however, the most important general may be the one who’s escaped almost all notice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has put on full display his penchant for knowing when the best course is to do nothing.

In the received wisdom, because Mr. Trump infamously welcomed a shutdown in December’s televised and contentious Oval Office meeting with Mrs. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, he gets all the blame for it. It’s only a matter of time, it follows, before skittish Republicans abandon him and he is forced to cry uncle. Naturally this is feeding regular news stories about “cracks” in the GOP coalition.

Enter Mr. McConnell. By making clear he won’t send up a bill the president won’t sign, the Kentucky Republican has empowered Mr. Trump while sparing his Senate GOP caucus the pressure that would come from the meaningless votes to reopen government that his Democratic counterpart, Mr. Schumer, is so desperate to have. It works even better because Mr. McConnell isn’t a grandstander.

Nor is it his first time around this block. In February 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died while on a hunting trip in West Texas. That same day Mr. McConnell released a statement about what would happen next. “The American people,” he wrote “should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.”

Barack Obama had a different idea. A month after Scalia’s death he nominated Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, to fill the seat. But Mr. McConnell soon schooled Mr. Obama in constitutional powers. While the president has the power to nominate, the Senate is under no obligation to consent.

Not only did Mr. McConnell’s decision to defer any hearings until after the election ultimately result in Neil Gorsuch being seated instead of Judge Garland, it likely helped make Mr. Trump president. Many Republicans who had grave doubts about Mr. Trump ended up pulling the lever for him anyway because they didn’t want Hillary Clinton deciding the composition of the Supreme Court. Mr. Trump further obliged by producing an impressive list of qualified jurists from which he said he would choose.

Now Mr. McConnell’s do-nothing approach is again confounding Democrats. House Republicans don’t matter much because Mrs. Pelosi has a Democratic majority, and so long as she can keep her caucus together she doesn’t need Republicans. The battle is for the Senate. But so long as Mr. McConnell refuses to hold votes on any bill without funding for the wall, Republican senators are unlikely to feel much pressure to split from the president.

Recent polls confirm as much. Two of them—one by YouGov/Economist and the other by Survey USA—report that between half and two-thirds of Americans blame the shutdown on Mr. Trump. These same polls show a third to a quarter blaming Mrs. Pelosi. But only 4% or 5% are blaming Republicans in Congress.

Think about that. News reports envision defecting Senate Republicans forcing a vote for a bill that wouldn’t include wall funding, but if Mr. McConnell holds the line it will never even get to that point. What incentive is there for him to change?

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump is coming to own the issue of border security. Not everyone is for a wall. But how tenable, over the long haul, is Mrs. Pelosi’s position that there isn’t a single thing the president could give her that would lead her to agree to offer even a dollar more in wall funding?

Not only is the speaker throwing away the best opportunity she will have these next two years to get the president to sign off on some Democratic priorities, but with each day her intransigence conveys to more Americans it isn’t only the wall Democrats oppose. It’s any genuine border security.

So where does it end? Those expecting an epic capitulation on either side are unrealistic; it would be too humiliating given the positions they’ve staked out. But sooner or later the Democrats are likely to feel pressure to give Mr. Trump more wall funding—less, certainly, than the $5.7 billion he’s seeking but more than the $1.3 billion they’ve offered—to get out of this impasse.

Going forward, most attention will continue to rest on Mr. Trump, Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer, who are all holding meetings, issuing statements before the TV cameras, and trying to make their respective cases to the public. Meanwhile, it may be Mr. McConnell who holds the key.

I don't mean for this thread to get political. But I created the thread to focus on WSJ's wacko opinions. The author is praising McConnell for doing nothing. Gotta love the WSJ

Weird that I read that while clever it is not right for McConnell to do that. Even threw in the shot about Scalia so not sure he is praising him. At any rate, why should an impartial author take Trump, Pelosi/Schumer or McConnell in order to defend them. Regardless of the matter it is an impasse and one of those groups needs to compromise or relent.

huh? this article is the essence of Beltway toxicity.

he's throwing bouquets for 10 paragraphs on mcconnell's talent (?) for putting party over country.

Okay, I didn't see it that way. I thought he was just thought he credited him for keeping his head down and under a rug. I am not sure how he forces anyone's hand.