President Obama announced on Friday that he had spoken to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) since the failure of the GOP’s so-called Plan B and “offered to compromise with Republicans in Congress” in the ongoing negotiations to avert the so-called fiscal cliff.

Obama said he is “ready and willing” to get “a comprehensive package done” of revenue increases in spending cuts “all at once” or in “several different steps” and reiterated that the final product will “need support from Democrats and Republicans.”

“Nobody gets 100 percent of what they want everyone has to give in a sensible way,” Obama said at least twice. He stressed that taxes will go up on all Americans unless Congress reaches a deal before Jan. 1 and called on lawmakers to pass legislation preserving lower rates for 98 percent of Americans. On Thursday, however, Republicans in the House refused to support a measure that increased taxes on Americans earning more than $1 million, even though it included a separate bill of spending cuts. Obama has called on preserving tax reductions for couples earning less than $250,000, but has increased the threshold to $400,000 in negotiations.

Lawmakers, Obama said, should “cool off, drink some egg nog, have Christmas cookies, sing some carols” and then return to Washington after Christmas and “work out a deal.” “We move forward together or we don’t move forward at all,” he insisted.

On Thursday night, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) tried and failed to pass his so-called Plan B to avert the looming fiscal cliff. The measure permanently extended a host of tax breaks, including the Bush tax cuts on income up to $1 million, the current estate and gift tax and parity for capital gains and dividend taxes. Boehner paired the bill with a spending reduction proposal in hopes of winning greater support from his caucus.

He gave Republicans almost everything they wanted, but ultimately, this effort to strengthen his position in the ongoing negotiations with the White House failed. Unable to secure the 217 votes needed for passage, Boehner pulled the bill, throwing his speakership into question and leaving the party in disarray.

At the very least, the Plan B debacle has shifted the leverage in the ongoing negotiations from the House Republicans to Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), as any package would have to win significant Democratic support in order to pass. Here are three lessons from Thursday’s failure:

1) Boehner can’t find 217 votes to raise taxes on the richest Americans — even when the increase is paired with spending cuts to domestic programs. Taxes would have gone up on the very wealthiest families, while a companion measure averted the military and domestic spending cuts set to take place in 2013 and replaced them with a host of reductions to food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare, and other Republican priorities.

2) Grover Norquist now supports raising tax rates. Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform announced on Wednesday that “Plan B” would not violate the ironclad oath nearly all Congressional Republicans have taken to never vote to raise taxes. In so doing, the group effectively conceded that President Obama’s proposed extension of tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income would also not violate the Norquist pledge.

3) The Republican caucus is out of step with Americans — and its voters. Sixty-eight percent believe the President has a mandate to cut taxes for working families; while 76 percent think that increasing taxes on the wealthy is an “acceptable” part of any deal. In fact, almost half of Republicans say the President has a mandate to raise taxes on the rich.

Boehner expressed frustration with his caucus during a press conference on Friday, comparing the intransigent members to lifeguards who refuse to save drowning swimmers.

“[I]f I can go in there and save 99 people that are drowning, that is what I should do as a lifeguard,” he explained. “But the perception was out there and a lot of our members did not want to deal with it.”

House Republicans let the five-year farm bill expire at the end of September without a new law to replace the massive measure covering billions of dollars in programs, including food stamps and agriculture subsidies. The Senate passed its own bipartisan, 10-year farm bill in June, and House Democrats and farm state Republicans attempted to force the House to consider a bill to replace it. But the GOP leadership steadfastly refused to vote on it.

As a result, milk prices could jump as high as $6 to $8 per gallon after Jan. 1, when the government will revert to following antiquated 1949 regulations without a farm bill in place:

Under the current program, the government sets a minimum price to cover dairy farmers’ production costs. If the market price drops below that, the government buys dairy products from farmers to buoy prices and increase demand. Since milk prices have remained above that minimum price in recent years, dairy farmers usually do better by selling their products commercially rather than to the government.

But if 1949 rules go into effect, the government would be required to buy dairy products at around $40 per hundredweight — roughly twice the current market price — to drive up the price of milk to cover dairy producers’ cost.

“It would be bad for consumer demand in the long run,” said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, which represents more than 32,000 dairy farmers.

In the short term, farmers would see a windfall by selling to the government at a higher price, but as the New York Times reports, that would lead to higher prices in stores and less milk available for manufacturing butter and cheese. “I don’t think customers and food processors are going to pay double what they are paying now for dairy products,” said Dean Norton, a dairy farmer and president of the New York Farm Bureau.

Members of the House Agriculture Committee say they will go back to work on a new five-year farm bill in the new congressional session.