The Washington Post headline screams, “District leaders furious Walmart breaking promise to build stores in poor neighborhoods.” So you would think that the primary reason behind the so-called broken promise would be near the top of the story, correct? Well, not if you’re reading the Washington Post when the reason for the broken promise is inconvenient to one of the Left’s favorite narratives — the minimum wage.

On top of three current D.C. Walmart stores already doing worse than expected, Walmart is backing out of the other two because the cost of doing business in DC is just too high. The DC minimum wage is already an inflated $11.50 an hour, and that could jump to $15 in November. Naturally the left-wing Washington Post buries that inconvenient news under more than a dozen paragraphs:

Evans said that, behind closed doors, Walmart officials were more frank about the reasons the company was downsizing. He said the company cited the District’s rising minimum wage, now at $11.50 an hour and possibly going to $15 an hour if a proposed ballot measure is successful in November. He also said a proposal for legislation requiring D.C. employers to pay into a fund for family and medical leave for employees, and another effort to require a minimum amount of hours for hourly workers were compounding costs and concerns for the retailer.

“They were saying, ‘How are we going to run the three stores we have, let alone build two more?’ ” Evans said.

Thanks to the Left’s stupid economic policies, hundreds of jobs that would have paid $7.25 an hour and up, are now gone. Hundreds of people in DC’s inner-cities that would have had work will now make nothing. Other than left-wing demagogues like the Washington Post and Democrat politicians, who are these policies helping?

Writing for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Sunday, Salena Zito perfectly explained why failed Democrats like Barack Obama and their media enablers push these disastrous minimum wage increases:

In the Obama economy, wages have not improved; in fact, they have created great unease and not inspired the confidence Americans once had in work — which is why the president has responded by pushing higher wages for service jobs once meant to be temporary bridges from high school and college to adult life.

He needed a straw man for his climate-change regulations that closed manufacturing industries, nearly made coal production extinct and clobbered the shale industry. So he blames companies like McDonald’s for not doubling the hourly pay for entry-level jobs to mask his inability to address the economic setbacks caused by his politics. …

Only 7 percent, or 214 out of 3,069 counties nationwide, recovered by 2015 to their pre-2008 numbers on total employment, economic expansion, home values and unemployment.

Obama and the Democrats have created an economy that can no longer create decent jobs, so they attempt to bully and cajole starter-job creators like Walmart and McDonald’s to offer wages and benefits way outside the market value.

This kind of economic policy cannot be sustained. Walmart has already announced the closure of some 140 stored in the U.S., which means the engine that drives our economy today, consumer spending, is slowing.

 

Hat tip: Townhall

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC