During tonight’s State of the Union, President Obama — noting that one quarter of millionaires are able to pay less in taxes than millions of middle class families — called for a minimum 30 percent income tax rate for millionaires. Obama also took on the favorite Republican talking point that calling for millionaires to pay their fair share in taxes is “class warfare”:

Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes…Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know it’s not right.

Watch it:

Even before the President’s speech ended, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) had posted a statement deriding the Buffett rule as a “political gimmick.” “Because the president clearly cannot run on his record, he has regrettably turned to the politics of envy and division,” Boehner’s statement read.

Earlier in the speech, President Obama also called for a mortgage refinancing plan, paid for by a new fee on the largest banks in the country. “I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates,” Obama said. “No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks. A small fee on the largest financial institutions will ensure that it won’t add to the deficit, and will give banks that were rescued by taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.”

Mitt Romney has been leading the way in the 2012 presidential race when it comes to donations from Wall Street, pulling in millions from the financial sector since he launched his campaign. And the industry’s favor for Romney comes across even more when looking at just the five biggest banks in the U.S.: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs

In fact, as McClatchy News noted, Romney has received more in donations from employees of the nation’s five biggest banks than all of the other presidential candidates combined:

Employees at the five largest U.S. banks by assets, including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., had given Romney about $600,000 through the first three quarters of 2011, according to the most recent filings available from the Federal Election Commission.

The second-largest recipient of bank employee contributions, President Barack Obama, had far less, about $200,000, the analysis showed. The Republican presidential hopeful with the second-highest total, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, dropped out of the race in mid-August.

Romney received more from employees of those top five banks than all the other candidates combined.

So far, the financial industry has made 69 percent of its donations in the presidential race to Republicans, a trend that, if it continues, “would mark the most skewed to one party the spending has been in more than two decades.”

The financial industry’s support for Romney is unsurprising, as he has made attacking the Dodd-Frank financial reform law a centerpiece of his campaign. He has even likened financial regulators to “gargoyles.” While he has paid lip service to needing some sort of financial reform, he has yet to propose any plan of his own.

Though foreclosures hit a four year low in 2011, one in 69 homes still received at least one foreclosure notice during the year. In some states, the rate was far higher, and the New York Federal Reserve estimates that there will be 3.6 million foreclosures in the next two years.

To much fanfare, the Obama administration unveiled a number of housing aid programs several years ago, claiming that those programs would aid millions of homeowners. However, these programs have not reached as many homeowners as they were supposed to, due to a combination of design flaws and bank intransigence:

The HAMP program, which was designed to lower troubled borrowers’ mortgage rates to no more than 31% of their monthly income, ran into problems almost immediately. Many lenders lost documents, and many borrowers didn’t qualify. Three years later, it has helped a scant 910,000 homeowners — a far cry from the promised 4 million.

HARP, which was intended to reach 5 million borrowers, has yielded about the same results. Through October, when it was revamped and expanded, the program had assisted 962,000.

So HAMP and HARP were meant to help 9 million homeowners combined, but have so far only reached 1.8 million. Also, just a small fraction of the money that Congress allocated to HAMP — the Home Affordable Modification Program — has been spent.

So far, the administration has been reluctant to push for principal reductions (reducing the outstanding amount of mortgage loans), even though such reductions could pump billions into the economy. Many of the nation’s attorneys general have also been crafting a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks that could involve some number of homeowners receiving some principal relief, but the numbers that have been floated are not large enough (in terms of dollars or homeowners helped) to substantially alleviate the housing problem. And until a solution to this problem is found, housing will continue to act as an anchor on the economic recovery.

Richard Cordray will make his first appearance on Capitol Hill today since President Obama recess appointed him as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Senate Republicans blocked Cordray’s nomination — and promised to block anyone nominated for the director’s position — but now that the fledgling agency has a director, it can finally begin fulfilling its mandate to protect consumers from the predatory lending practices that were rampant prior to the financial crisis and during the recession that followed.

That Cordray is now the director will likely not quell Republican attacks on the agency or skepticism of his agenda. When Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who conceived the idea of the CFPB and was once the favorite to be its first director, testified before Congress last year, she faced relentless attacks from House Republicans who oppose the Bureau.

But despite GOP opposition, the CFPB has begun taking important steps toward fulfilling its mission. Based on Cordray’s prepared remarks and other reports, ThinkProgress compiled a rundown of the programs the CFPB has already established to aid consumers and the steps it plans to take in the future:

Supervising financial institutions and enforcing the law: In 2011, the CFPB launched a large bank supervision program aimed at ensuring that the nation’s biggest banks comply with federal consumer financial laws. It will also add heightened supervision of nonbanks, like mortgage lenders, servicers, brokers, payday lenders, and consumer reporting agencies. Such supervision should prevent the predatory and discriminatory lending and foreclosure fraud that played a role in the financial crisis. The CFPB has already begun enforcement actions, cooperating with state investigations into lending and foreclosures and filing lawsuits of its own against lenders that broke the law.

Establishing programs to help consumers: The CFPB has already established multiple programs to aid consumers and is in the process of creating others. Know Before You Owe was launched to bring transparency to the financial industry, allowing consumers to better understand agreements made on mortgage, student loan, and credit card lending. The Office of Servicemember Affairs has been tasked with aiding and educating current and former members of the military — many of whom were among the biggest victims of the housing crisis and the deceptive practices that followed. The Office of Financial Protection for Older Americans, meanwhile, is doing the same for senior citizens, who are often targets of scams and fraud. The CFPB has also established a number of feedback programs that allow consumers to share their own stories — good or bad — about dealing with the financial industry.

Addressing discriminatory lending: African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities were twice as likely to be affected by the housing crisis as whites. Many lending institutions pushed minorities into subprime loans even though they qualified for regular prime loans. The CFPB’s Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity was created to end such practices by providing oversight and enforcement of fair lending laws and by working with private industry leaders, civil rights groups, and consumer advocates to ensure fair lending compliance.

Improving and streamlining financial regulation: The CFPB has already begun efforts to streamline and improve the regulations that affect the financial industry and will use feedback from both industry and consumer advocates to do so. The agency will update, modify, or eliminate unnecessary or outdated regulations, while attempting to make complying with others easier. Though Republicans have targeted the agency as anti-industry, the CFPB is committed to maintaining outreach to industry leaders. “A well-grounded understanding of the nation’s largest financial companies is essential to fulfilling our mission to improve consumer financial markets,” Cordray will say today.

Mitt Romney’s newly released tax returns show that he made about $20 million in each of the last two years, while paying a 13.9 percent tax rate in 2010. He anticipates paying about 15 percent for 2011.

Romney is able to drive his tax rate down below that of many middle class families because, as he freely admitted before, nearly all of his income comes from investments, and is thus taxed at the top capital gains tax rate of 15 percent, rather than the top income tax rate of 35 percent. Romney also benefits from a tax loophole that lets wealthy money managers pay a 15 percent rate on the payments they receive to oversee other people’s investments.

That particular tax loophole — known as the carried interest loophole — is still helping Romney lower his tax rate, as his lucrative retirement deal includes a hefty portion of income that qualifies as carried interest. In fact, over the last two years, Romney made $12.8 million that qualifies as carried interest. As Paul Krugman pointed out, this saved Romney $2.6 million in taxes:

First, $13 million of the total was carried interest, which gets taxed like capital gains but is really just commissions that receive special treatment for no good reason. No profits taxes were paid on that income; right there, a minimally defensible tax code would have levied $2.6 million more in taxes on Romney.

Income qualified as carried interest is also exempt from the payroll tax. Closing the carried interest loophole could raise $10 billion in revenue over 10 years, while doing nothing to harm investment. As the Bloomberg News editorial board said yesterday, “Romney, by using this opportunity to call for the end of the carried-interest loophole, could in one swoop neutralize an issue that has hampered his campaign and display the leadership he says he would bring to the White House. In an election year dominated by the twin issues of the deficit and income inequality, this proposal is one both parties, and their candidates, should embrace.”

After weeks of refusals and equivocation, Mitt Romney finally released his tax returns last night to a handful of media outlets, showing that he made $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year. He only actually released one year of returns, 2010, and his estimated return for 2011, even though many have called on him to follow the precedent set by his father and release many more years of returns.

Nonetheless, there is much to learn from the astonishing 550 pages of returns Romney released:

1. Romney paid a lower tax rate than many middle-class Americans: Romney’s returns reveal that he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent, lower even than the low rate of 15 percent he estimated he paid last week. While this is far less than what many middle-class Americans pay, it’s also well below what wealthy people pay. The average effective tax rate for someone in Romney’s income bracket is 25 percent.

2. Romney makes more in a day than the average American makes in a year, and becomes a 1 percenter every week: As Bloomberg News notes, “In 2008, according to the IRS, the median adjusted gross income was $33,048, which Romney made in less than a day. Reaching the top 1 percent of taxpayers required $380,354 in adjusted gross income, about Romney’s earnings in a week.”

3. Romney paid almost nothing in payroll taxes: Romney contributed just .1 percent of his income to Social Security and Medicare in 2010 via the payroll tax because the tax is only assessed on earned wages, but all of Romney’s income came from investments. Most working Americans pay 7.65 percent.

4. Romney has accounts in countries notorious for tax dodging: By now, it’s well known by now that Romney invests in funds based in the Cayman Islands, but Romney’s returns were “crammed with information about foreign holdings” and reveal that he held accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg, countries famous for hiding money thanks their low taxes and strict banking secrecy laws. Aides said he closed his Swiss account in 2010 because it might have been “politically embarrassing.”

5. Romney and Gingrich’s tax plans would slash Romney’s taxes: Romney already pays less than many middle class Americans, but under his proposed tax plan, his rates would be slashed in half. Meanwhile, under challenger Newt Gingrich’s plan, Romney would pay almost nothing, since Gingrich has proposed cutting the capital gains tax rate to zero and Romney earns almost all of his money from investments.

6. Romney needs four lawyers, including the former IRS commissioner to defend his tax plan: Romney’s campaign held a conference call with reporters this morning to defend and explain his tax returns, and apparently felt the need to have former IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg, along with three other top lawyers and his campaign communications director to explain the returns. At one point, the call had to be interrupted so officials could confer with mega accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Another small revelation from Romney’s returns is that while Romney said his speaking fees amounted to “not very much” in terms of income, he actually made $111,000 in speaking fees in 2011 and $529,000 in 2010, as Politico’s Ken Vogel points out.