During Tuesday night’s State of the Union, President Obama called on Congress to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour. Not only is the proposal potentially good for business, but, according to a report released Wednesday from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, raising the minimum wage would also be a pillar for women’s rights. Here’s why, in three charts:

1. Two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women. A disproportionate number of women in the workforce hold the lowest-paying jobs, a fact that contributes to the gender pay gap. This means that women are far more likely to benefit from a wage increase:

2. Families benefit from a wage increase. Sixty percent of women are the primary or co-bread winners in their households. More money in their paychecks means more for their families:

3. Over 17 million women would benefit. The total number of women who would be earning more if Congress approved a minimum wage hike is 13.1 million. 8.9 million of these receive a direct benefit, while another 4.2 million women would enjoy the so-called “spillover effect” of increased wages to keep up with a changing wage structure:

Arguments against the minimum wage — made, within hours of Obama’s speech, by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) — are predicated on the idea that it would weaken job growth or ruin the economy. In fact, studies show the opposite: that it would strengthen job creation, particularly when unemployment is high, as it is now.

The Republican-controlled North Carolina state senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to slash the state’s unemployment insurance program Tuesday, reducing the amount of aid unemployed workers can receive and also the number of weeks they will be eligible to receive it. The legislation reduces the maximum benefit from $535 a week to $350, while reducing the time workers can receive aid from 26 weeks to 20.

The cuts will also cost unemployed North Carolinians access to the federal unemployment insurance program, which is based on state programs. The change will cost 170,000 North Carolinians a total of $780 million in federal funds, adding to the total they will lose in state funds. North Carolina’s unemployment rate is 9.2 percent, more than a percentage point higher than the national rate, but proponents of the legislation say it will help workers find jobs faster, Reuters reports:

“What this really should be called is a re-employment rather than an unemployment bill,” said Republican state Senator Bob Rucho, a sponsor of the measure. “We’re trying to put North Carolinians back to work.“

The average unemployed worker has been off the job for 35 weeks, meaning North Carolina will now fall far short in helping many of its jobless residents. And Despite Rucho’s assertions, and despite typical Republican concerns that programs like unemployment compensation cause a “culture of dependency,” studies show that workers who receive unemployment insurance look harder for jobs than those who do not. More likely, the bill will simply make the lives of unemployed workers even harder, preventing them from falling back on unemployment aid and cutting America’s already-stingy unemployment program even closer to the bone.

If the bill is approved and signed by Gov. Pat McCrory (R), who has sign he will sign it, North Carolina will become the seventh state to make cuts to unemployment insurance.

During a mostly uneventful confirmation hearing today, Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, revived the idea of implementing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee. The fee, meant to be applied to the nation’s biggest banks for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, was proposed by the administration in 2010, but went nowhere.

During a discussion with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH0, Lew suggested the fee as a possible remedy for banks that are too-big-to-fail:

BROWN: Don’t you think it’s unfair for these banks, $2 trillion banks in at least a couple of cases, these megabanks to receive government subsidized funding advantages that community banks in West Akron or Pomeroy or Sycamore, Ohio don’t get?

LEW: Senator, the administration has proposed a financial responsibility fee that would fall on those large banks, which is something that we think is the right way to assess responsibility for past burdens put on taxpayers. In terms of the access to different borrowing windows, I’d be happy to follow up with you on the differences between access and community banks and large money center banks. But in general, our view is that we have to distinguish between the large banks that create risk to the system and smaller institutions that are less likely to. And we’ve tried to put less burdens on the smaller banks.

Watch it:

The administration has framed this fee from the beginning as only useful in order to recoup losses from the financial crisis. But it would be extremely useful as a permanent fee on the biggest banks for two reasons: it would mitigate some of the advantages enjoyed by the biggest firms and would raise needed revenue from a sector of the economy that can afford it.

As Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Narayana Kocherlakota noted, a bank tax has the benefit requiring huge banks to internalize some of the cost of their extreme growth and risky activities. “Financial institutions fail to internalize all the risks that their investment decisions impose on society. Economists would say that bailouts thereby create a risk ‘externality.’ There is nearly a century of economic thought about how to deal with externalities of various sorts — and the usual answer is through taxation,” he said. “Taxes are a good response because they create incentives for firms to internalize the costs that would otherwise be external.”

President Obama last night called on Congress to make it easier for families to refinance their mortgages. Noting that many eligible families are having a hard time refinancing, Obama urged Congress to pass a bill as soon as it can that would ease the process and open up refinancing to those currently blocked out:

Part of our rebuilding effort must also involve our housing sector. Today, our housing market is finally healing from the collapse of 2007. Home prices are rising at the fastest pace in six years, home purchases are up nearly 50 percent, and construction is expanding again.

But even with mortgage rates near a 50-year low, too many families with solid credit who want to buy a home are being rejected. Too many families who have never missed a payment and want to refinance are being told no. That’s holding our entire economy back, and we need to fix it. Right now, there’s a bill in this Congress that would give every responsible homeowner in America the chance to save $3,000 a year by refinancing at today’s rates. Democrats and Republicans have supported it before. What are we waiting for? Take a vote, and send me that bill.

The bill in question is one proposed by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ). Housing policy expert John Griffith explains here why the bill will help:

Congress needs to step in to help the roughly 18 million more Fannie- or Freddie-backed borrowers who are current on their monthly payments and carry above-market interest rates, according to estimates from Moody’s Analytics. By refinancing to today’s low rates — typically well below 4 percent — many of these families can save an average of $2,600 per year in mortgage payments, according to the Congressional Budget Office. [...]

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates that the proposed legislation would result in 2.9 million more refinancings, helping borrowers save a combined $7 billion annually in mortgage payments. Since many of these borrowers are middle-income families, most of those savings will likely be spent elsewhere in the economy, bolstering growth and creating jobs.

The administration has said that it will implement some changes to refinancing programs by executive order, if Congress doesn’t act.

President Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour during his State of the Union last night, a proposal that was quickly rejected by top Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan. Today, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) also came out against the proposal.

“When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it,” Boehner said at a House Republican press conference this morning. “At a time when Americans are still asking the question ‘Where are the jobs?’ why would we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people?”

Contrary to Boehner’s claims, research suggests that minimum wage increases have little or no effect on job creation. One study found “no detectable employment losses,” another found “no impact on hours worker or employment levels,” and another found that the minimum wage actually strengthens employment. Other studies found that raising the minimum wage doesn’t impact job growth even if it is done during periods of high unemployment.

The low-wage job sector accounts for a majority of the jobs created since the recession, but the minimum wage remains historically weak. To match the buying power it had in 1968, today’s wage would need to be raised by $3 per hour. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour would benefit 21 million workers.

During his State of the Union address last night, President Obama called for raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour, up from its current $7.25, and indexing it to inflation so that it rises as the economy grows. If the increase were to happen, it would give the minimum wage its highest purchasing power since 1981, lifting millions of families above the poverty line.

But top Republicans are already coming out against it. During interviews last night and today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) both made clear that they oppose raising the minimum wage, citing its supposed effect on job creation:

RYAN: I think it’s inflationary. I think it actually is counterproductive in many ways. You end up costing job from people who are the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Look, I wish we could just pass a law saying everybody should make more money without any adverse consequences. The problem is you’re costing jobs from those who are just trying to get entry level jobs. The goal ought to be is to get people out of entry level jobs into better jobs, better paying jobs. That’s better education and a growing economy. Those are some of the things he talked about and I don’t think raising minimum wage — and history is very clear about this — doesn’t actually accomplish those goals.

RUBIO: I want to see people making a lot more than $9 an hour in the United States. And the way do you that is through rapid economic growth where people are being paid a lot more than that. $9 is not enough. I think we all would want that. The question is is a minimum wage the best way to do it? And history has said the answer is absolutely not. In fact, the impact of minimum wage usually is that businesses hire less people. That’s the impact of it. They’ll just hire less people to do the same amount of work…We have a lot of history to prove that the minimum wage , raising the minimum wage does not grow the middle class.

Watch a compilation:

In fact, the history says that raising the minimum wage has little if any impact on job creation. A study published in November 2010 in the Review of Economics and Statistics, for instance, found “no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States.” Another published in 2011 “found no impact on hours worked or employment levels.”

The seminal study of the minimum wage, done by economists David Card and Alan Krueger, found that job creation was actually strengthened by an increase in the minimum wage. This result has been found time and time again. So Rubio and Ryan have the history exactly backwards: raising the minimum wage results in higher wages and more purchasing power for workers, not job losses.