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.

Since the deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff” was signed, Republicans have tried to portray it as “the last word” on taxes, since the deal included $600 billion in revenue. But last year, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) reportedly agreed to a deal that included $1 trillion in revenue. When asked by a reporter during a press briefing today why that total is now off the table, Boehner had no answer other than blaming President Obama:

Q: You said that President Obama quote “got his revenues, has his revenues.” But during December you offered $1 trillion in revenue, the fiscal cliff deal got $600 billion. If Obama took your offer, your last offer, $1 trillion for $1 trillion, could that pass the House?

BOEHNER: Who knows what would happen today? The fact is that the $1 trillion in spending cuts and reforms that were on the table, the president never agreed to. And the $1 trillion I put on the table wasn’t enough for the president.

Watch it:

However, the deficit reduction achieved since 2011 has still overwhelmingly favored spending cuts to tax increases, meaning that any budget deal going forward should include new revenue in order to be truly balanced. As the Congressional Budget Office reported yesterday, the country’s projected deficits have improved substantially over the last few years, while the debt is all but stabilized. The far bigger problem is that tighter fiscal policy from Washington is stifling economic growth.

One House Republican yesterday admitted that he would rather agree to a new increase in revenue than see the so-called “sequester” spending cuts take place on schedule in March.

In response to today’s report showing that the economy created 157,000 jobs last month, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) released a statement lamenting the disbanding of a symbolic jobs council and blasting a nonexistent surge in government spending:

“This is the wrong time for President Obama to scrap his jobs council and delay his budget. Month after month we see the same thing: high unemployment and even more debt. More than 12 million Americans are still unemployed, and it’s been that way for far too long. If government spending were what causes economic growth, as the president believes, then the economy today should be booming, and the unemployment rate in America should be plummeting.”

“Instead of accepting sluggish job growth as the new normal, we need to work together to grow our economy, address our debt crisis, and expand opportunity for all Americans. In the weeks ahead, Republicans will outline another budget that addresses our spending problem and promotes robust job creation.”

This statement shows Boehner has no interest in conveying that he understands what’s happening in the economy. For starters, there has been no surge in government spending: spending under Obama is growing at its slowest rate since the Eisenhower administration. In fact, the slight economic contraction that occurred in the fourth quarter of last year is solely attributable to a drop in government spending, as the private sector hummed along.

Next, Boehner decries the disbanding of a purely symbolic jobs council about 18 months after congressional Republicans blocked the actual American Jobs Act. While President Obama’s jobs council was powerless to implement real changes, the American Jobs Act, according to several independent economic analyses, would have significantly boosted economic growth and created millions of jobs.

Europe’s current economic malaise and the latest GDP numbers show the detrimental effect that spending cuts can have in a weak economy. Yet Boehner and the GOP continue to push in that direction, clinging to an economic theory that simply hasn’t worked.

After an eleventh-hour deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, Republicans are already looking forward to the next manufactured crisis: the debt ceiling fight. Though raising the debt ceiling was considered a routine order of business in the past, radical Republicans took the nation to the brink of credit default for the first time in history, refusing to raise the debt ceiling if Democrats did not agree to devastating spending cuts.

The US hit its debt limit again on New Year’s Eve 2012, and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) seems ready to gamble with US credit again. As the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore reports, the Speaker may try to avoid a sustainable deal over the debt ceiling, instead increasing the limit little by little. This would result in another debt ceiling fight every month:

I ask Mr. Boehner if he will take the debt-ceiling talks to the brink—risking a government shutdown and debt downgrade from the credit agencies—given that it didn’t work in 2011 and President Obama has said he won’t bargain on the matter.

The debt bill is “one point of leverage,” Mr. Boehner says, but he also hedges, noting that it is “not the ultimate leverage.” He says that Republicans won’t back down from the so-called Boehner rule: that every dollar of raising the debt ceiling will require one dollar of spending cuts over the next 10 years. Rather than forcing a deal, the insistence may result in a series of monthly debt-ceiling increases.

Most Americans want to avoid another debt ceiling fight like the 2011 debacle, which led to an unprecedented downgrade of US credit, an all-time low approval rating for Congress, and cost taxpayers $18.9 billion. But Boehner is taking his cues from anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who floated the idea of a monthly debt ceiling increase as a way to extort more spending cuts from Democrats. Norquist’s strict pledge to never raise taxes, which most Republicans have signed, was the main cause of the crisis in 2011. Other Republicans seem eager to replicate the experience, including newcomer Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who encouraged his colleagues to aim for another government shutdown.

If Boehner takes Norquist’s advice and institutes a regular debt ceiling battle, he may fulfill his own warning in 2011, when he predicted a global “financial disaster” if the US did not raise the debt ceiling.

Fresh off a last-minute deal to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the combination of spending cuts and tax increases that was supposed to take effect at the beginning of the year, Congress now has another fiscal issue at hand: the nation hit its borrowing limit on New Year’s Eve, and the debt ceiling needs to be increased to avoid a default that would have catastrophic economic consequences.

Republicans are already promising a repeat of the summer 2011 fight that nearly led to such a default (and ultimately created the fiscal cliff). Senate Republicans have promised to hold the debt limit hostage for spending cuts, and House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) office has indicated similar intentions. “If they want to get the debt limit raised, they are going to have to engage and accept that reality,” Brendan Buck, a spokesperson for Boehner, said of spending cuts.

But in the winter of 2011, before he led the GOP into the fight that caused the first credit downgrade in American history, increased borrowing costs, and nearly led to a default, Boehner proved that he knew the consequences of not raising the debt limit: it would cause “financial disaster” for the entire world:

Boehner said it would mean “financial disaster” for the global economy if Congress were unable to come to a deal to raise the debt ceiling this spring.

“That would be a financial disaster, not only for us, but for the worldwide economy,” Boehner said on “Fox News Sunday” of the risk of default. “I don’t think it’s a question that’s even on the table.”

Before 2011, raising the debt ceiling was a matter of course, one the minority party often used to embarrass the president before it ultimately allowed the increase. The current crop of Republican leaders voted repeatedly to raise the debt limit under President Bush. Only now have Republicans begun to insist on spending cuts equal to the amount of the debt increase, a policy that is hardly sensible, since the debt limit simply grants the U.S. Treasury the authority to borrow to pay the debts Congress has already accrued and does not authorize new spending. Failure to grant Treasury that authority, as Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) said in 2002, would be “like eating a big meal and walking out on the bill,” except that walking out on this bill, as Boehner himself said, would cause a global financial catastrophe. (HT Greg Sargent)

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.”