If Mitt Romney hoped that his 2010 tax return would draw less attention if he released it on the same day as President Obama’s speech, he badly miscalculated. Obama didn’t mention Romney in his speech, but he didn’t have to. The 13.9 percent Romney paid in taxes might as well have appeared as a subtitle to the annual political theater that is the State of the Union address.

The address contained what will be the theme of Obama’s re-election campaign: economic justice. Obama called for reform of the federal tax code and the imposition of the “Buffett rule,” which would require taxpayers with an income of $1 million or more to pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent rather than the 15 percent people like Warren Buffett and Romney pay because the bulk of their income comes from capital gains and dividends. The president is right. And his plan represents a stark contrast to those of his would-be GOP opponents, who would lower taxes on the rich, thereby increasing the deficit.

The Buffett rule won’t become law this year, nor will any other tax reform. Odds of congressional action in an election year are somewhere between infinitesimal and zilch. The exception could be — and this is still a very long shot — a compromise that would see the continuation of some of the George W. Bush tax cuts due to expire at year’s end. The president would prefer to allow the cuts to be retained for households that earn less than $250,000 per year and revert to their old rates of 36 percent and 39.6 percent for the well-to-do. The 15 percent tax on capital gains would rise to 20 percent and stock dividends would be taxed as regular income.

Upward mobility in America has declined. Median household income in 2010 fell to nearly 1970 levels. Meanwhile, the wealthy made great gains. If the president’s choice is between a bad tax deal offered by congressional Republicans or doing nothing, the answer should be do nothing. A tax increase will be painful for lowerincome filers, but allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would eliminate a huge chunk of the deficit and make deep cuts to social programs that benefit the poor and middle class unnecessary.

“Now you can call this class warfare all you want,” Obama said of his call for a higher tax rate on the wealthy. “But asking a billionaire to pay as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

Placing Obama’s proposals side-byside with the tax plans put forward by the men who seek to replace him demonstrates why tax fairness will be at the heart of the 2012 presidential contest. All the Republican plans, but particularly the ones proposed by Romney and Newt Gingrich, would lower taxes dramatically on the wealthy, increase the deficit by trillions of dollars, and mean higher taxes for some in the middle class.

Romney wants all the Bush tax cuts extended and the estate tax eliminated. His plan, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, would lower the taxes of people who earn a million-plus by about $300,000 per year. Gingrich’s plan, which also lowers taxes on the rich, also wipes out the capital gains tax, which means Romney’s 14 percent rate would fall to something near zero.

Come November, to put it in the president’s terms, voters will have the choice. We can be “a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of people barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”

— The Concord (N.H.) Monitor