President Barack Obama will on Tuesday night use his state of the union address, the annual declaration of his legislative hopes, to rally support for tax increases for the rich to fund tax reductions for everyone else.
Mr Obama's address is the highlight of the US political calendar and the statement of intent that may set the political climate for his final two years in the White House and the 2016 presidential election.
The sweeping progressive tax proposal, flagged late on Saturday by the White House and likely to be the main policy goal of Tuesday night's address, has been dubbed Mr Obama's "Robin Hood plan".
Given the opposition among Republicans to piling financial burdens on wealthy Americans to pay for benefits for the lower and middle classes, it will struggle to go beyond an item on his policy wish-list.
Partisan scrapheap Republicans, in control of Congress for the first time in eight years since the midterm elections in November, have rubbished Mr Obama's plan before he has personally presented it. The proposals are likely to end up on the partisan scrapheap, where many ambitious plans from his six previous state of the union addresses have been consigned.
The president has proposed tax increases of $320 billion (€275 million) over the next decade by increasing the investment tax rate and closing a loophole that allows individuals to pass on inherited assets tax-free.
These measures will help pay for tax reductions of $175 billion, mostly going on tax credits for working families and for child care.
The central plank of his proposal is to raise the capital gains and dividends rate on couples earning more than $500,000 a year from 23.8 per cent to 28 per cent, raising $210 billion for the tax-cutting measures. (The rate has already been raised from 15 per cent during his presidency.) The remaining $110 billion will be raised from imposing a fee on the largest and financial companies with the heaviest borrowings.
The proposed taxes would help fund another progressive initiative that Mr Obama announced earlier this month: two years of free community college education for an estimated nine million students.
That idea is the latest action from a president with nothing to lose from floating his progressive goals, now that he has been freed from the campaign restraints following the Democratic losses in November.
Mr Obama has appeared invigorated since then, announcing a series of bold actions – a climate change deal with China, immigration orders protecting millions of illegal immigrants from deportation and the restoration of economic ties with communist Cuba after half a century.
Undecided voters He is poised to continue that streak on Tuesday night with an eye on shaping the 2016 presidential race and trying to electrify Democratic and undecided voters who sat out the midterm elections in such large numbers. (The turnout was just over 36 per cent, as many Democrats and independents sat out the election.)
"This is not a speech to Republican voters out there; they're not going to vote for you," said Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University in Washington. "This has got to be primarily a speech to the Democratic base and to possible Democratic recruits among swing/sway voters or independents."
The White House announced the names and backgrounds of the guests who will be seated next to First Lady Michelle Obama during the president's speech, giving clues as to what he will talk about.
They include a community college student, a construction worker, a working mother of two pre-school children, small business owners and an immigrant who was brought illegally to the US as a child.
