DC Mayor Vincent Gray just vetoed the living wage bill:

Mayor Vincent C. Gray vetoed legislation Thursday that would force the District’s largest retailers to pay their workers significantly more, choosing the potential for jobs and development at home over joining a national fight against low-wage work.

Gray’s quandary is playing out in many U.S. cities, where local leaders who generally sympathize with worker causes are also eager to lure jobs and commerce for their constituents. Retailers, most notably Wal-Mart, have placed an increasing focus on urban expansion, while unions and advocates for workers have pushed measures like the District’s “living wage” bill as a valuable hedge against the proliferation of low-paying jobs.

The veto, which is unlikely to be overridden by the D.C. Council, clears the way for Wal-Mart to continue its entry into the District — plans years in the making that were thrown into question after lawmakers embraced the wage proposal this year.

Gray (D) announced his veto in a letter delivered to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson on Thursday morning. It explained his opposition to the bill and tried to soften the political consequences by disclosing his intention to seek a minimum-wage increase from all employers, not just large retailers.

In the letter, Gray said the measure was “not a true living-wage bill,” because its effect would be limited to “a small fraction of the District’s workforce.” He called the bill a “job-killer,” citing threats from Wal-Mart and other retailers that they would not locate in the city if the bill becomes law.

“If I were to sign this bill into law, it would do nothing but hinder our ability to create jobs, drive away retailers, and set us back on the path to prosperity for all,” he said.

In an interview, Gray did not say what minimum wage he would seek, except that any increase would be “reasonable” and would come after consultation with lawmakers and interested parties.

The whole “job killer” argument is bullsh%$.

The studies are fairly clear here.  Walmart does not create jobs, it takes jobs from smaller retailers, aggressively puts those workers on the public dole, and underpays them:

Earlier studies did not adequately deal with selection bias: i.e., the problem that when and where Walmart chooses to open new stores is not random, but tends to be correlated with other variables. Those confounding variables make it difficult to determine whether local employment outcomes are causally related to Walmart‘s entry, or to something else. I’ll skip the technical details, but suffice it to say Neumark and his co-authors devised a sophisticated methodology that accounts for the selection bias. Using data from over 3,000 counties, their results show that when a Walmart store opens, it kills an average 150 retail jobs at the county level, with each Walmart worker replacing about 1.4 retail workers. These results are robust under a variety of models and tests.

This sucks, and it likely that the override will fail.