Endorsements of Operation Abigail
Extract: I endorse the Adams Institute’s median-top household net worth tethering plan, both as a way to reverse extreme wealth concentration and rebuild America’s middle class, and to enhance the productivity, rationality, and sustainability of American capitalism.
Experience: Founder and former Chairman, FX Concepts (formerly, the largest foreign currency exchange hedge fund in the world, with $14 billion under management) Trustee Emeritus, Franklin University Switzerland.
Endorsement, from John R. Taylor, Jr.
July 2, 2024
I endorse the Adams Institute’s median-top household net worth tethering plan, both as a way to reverse extreme wealth concentration and rebuild America’s middle class, and to enhance the productivity, rationality, and sustainability of American capitalism.
My formative years – studying political systems at Princeton and UNC Chapel Hill and starting my career as Chemical Bank’s political analyst – taught me to focus on the connection between politics and finance. In building FX Concepts over 30 years into the largest foreign exchange hedge fund in the world, with $14 billion under management, I developed my focus on political economy into an expertise. And after founding and serving as chairman of UNC Chapel Hill hemophilia therapeutics spinout Inspiration BioPharmaceuticals, Inc., I gained an even deeper understanding of the inner workings of innovation and venture capital, regulation and industry, and private equity and debt. I give this endorsement based on that experience.
The Adams Institute plan is simple: It would cap the top households at a rational multiple of the median – for example 10,000:1 – such that elite outcomes rise and fall lockstep in proportion to middle-class outcomes. The logic behind this could not be more faithful to capitalism: This approach simply scales capitalism’s own device of the incentive plan to the national scale. At 10,000:1, every $10,000 increase to the median raises or lowers the cap by $100,000,000. Under the ratio, America’s most powerful market actors cannot indiscriminately extract from workers without jeopardizing their own prospects. This incentivizes households having market power to effectuate a more efficient, rational, and sustainable allocation of American prosperity than we have today. Since this plan operates only on households, which are the final owners of almost all wealth, it imposes no new regulations or taxes on enterprise.
I want to emphasize this plan’s power to curb the harmful effects that several macroeconomic forces exert on ordinary households, including rentierism, inflation, monopolization, offshoring, and automation. This plan could mitigate the negative effects of these forces because their downward impact is ultimately registered in calculating the median household net worth. Every dollar ordinary households lose to say price hikes, or a job sent overseas, or a robot, reduces the national median. But since this plan would tether the top households to that median, the more effectively elite market actors deploy these techniques against labor, the more they’d just be hurting themselves.
I’ve seen much in my career, but I’ve seen no better alternative to incentivize positive-sum economic behavior and solve a myriad of economic and political problems than the Adams Institute’s plan, which is why I give this endorsement.
John R. Taylor, Jr.
Founder and former Chairman, FX Concepts
Trustee Emeritus, Franklin University Switzerland
Extract: What I appreciate about Operation Abigail is that it’s not a conventional tax-and-spend redistribution plan. Its goal is not to take from the rich and give to the poor. Its purpose is to promote wealth de concentration through market actors themselves, by making it in their direct financial interest to support a thriving middle class. That’s a fundamentally conservative and capitalist idea.
Experience: Former U.S. Marine, Retired Alabama State Trooper & ABI Investigator, Member, Alabama House of Representatives (2002–2022), Author of Alabama Constitutional Amendment No. 8 (2012) (tethered Alabama state legislator pay to the Alabama state median income; an early example of constitutional median-tethering).
Endorsement, from Mike Ball
May 2, 2024
Throughout my career – first as a U.S. Marine, then as a state trooper and investigator with the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, and finally as a Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives for two decades – I have always believed public service means putting the people first. During my time in office from 2002 to 2022, I worked to honor that commitment, including authoring Amendment No. 8 to the Alabama Constitution, which passed in 2012. That amendment tethered legislative pay to the median household income in our state – a reform rooted in the belief that those who serve the people should only prosper when the people do too. And time has proven my common-sense proposal successful.
That’s why I support Operation Abigail.
Operation Abigail is a national long-term incentive plan that seeks to reverse wealth concentration in America by tying the future wealth growth of ultra-rich households to the well being of the middle class. The plan introduces an initial 10,000:1 ratio between the net worth of the wealthiest households and the national median. In essence, if the middle class isn’t growing, neither is the top. This isn’t redistribution – it’s incentive alignment.
What I appreciate about Operation Abigail is that it’s not a conventional tax-and-spend redistribution plan. Its goal is not to take from the rich and give to the poor. Its purpose is to promote wealth de-concentration through market actors themselves, by making it in their direct financial interest to support a thriving middle class. That’s a fundamentally conservative and capitalist idea.
As a former Republican legislator in the Deep South, I know the many arguments that have been raised against taxation – and many of them have merit. Taxes should be l limited, fair, and justified by necessity. But taxation is a necessary evil when there is no other reasonable enforcement mechanism available. Operation Abigail does entail a heavy tax on households exceeding the 10,000:1 ratio, but I support it for several reasons:
In short, while Operation Abigail’s use of taxation may resemble other tax proposals on the surface, it is very different in spirit and design. This is not a program to fund socialism or democratic-socialism – it’s a plan to prevent them from taking root by restoring the middle-class foundation that makes limited government possible. As a Reagan Republican, I understand that government can only get smaller when the middle class gets bigger. Operation Abigail also understands this truth.
Moreover, Operation Abigail builds on the same principle I championed with Amendment No. 8 – median benchmarking. In that case, we tethered legislative pay to the economic condition of our citizens. Operation Abigail scales that principle to the national scale, applying it to the household net worth of market actors. In both cases, the goal is to create positive-sum incentives, where public prosperity benefits everyone, including those at the top.
At its heart, Operation Abigail is about preserving the democratic-republican model of government by addressing the underlying middle-class insecurity that fuels rising polarization and authoritarianism. That mission speaks deeply to me, not just as a legislator or a patriot, but as someone who believes that public service must be rooted in humility and purpose.
I have always believed that leaders should have a servant’s heart. Operation Abigail reflects that belief. It expects our leaders to live up to the words of Abigail Adams, who wrote: “If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind, whom should we serve?”
Operation Abigail will not be without its detractors and its criticisms – no meaningful policy ever is – but it points us in the right direction. And in these times, we cannot afford to ignore solutions that have potential to benefit everyone, particularly the middle class. I’m proud to endorse it.
Mike Ball
Former U.S. Marine
Retired Alabama State Trooper & ABI Investigator
Member, Alabama House of Representatives (2002–2022)
Author of Alabama Constitutional Amendment No. 8 (2012)
Extract: I endorse the Adams Institute’s plan because I believe that the positive feedback loops that would arise from renewing our middle classes – both from the standpoint of promoting the general welfare, and more specifically in liberating our democratic processes and our scientific minds from the faction and polarization which cripple them – would be infinite.
Experience: Scientist in pathophysiology and translational gene therapy, focused on complex global problems.
Endorsement, from Michael O’Callaghan
October 1, 2024
I happily endorse the Adams Institute’s plan to rebuild America’s middle class through the technique of median-top household wealth tethering. I give this endorsement for three reasons:
First, I agree with the Institute’s guiding premise that the best political outcomes tend to flow from the largest middle classes. I was born shortly after World War II on the other side of the world. From my hometown in New Zealand, to Massey University (to study and play rugby for the All Blacks), to Toulouse France for a masters and residency, Cambridge University England for my PhD, UC Davis USA on sabbatical leave then most recently (now 40 years) to greater Boston (where I proudly make my home as a U.S. citizen). I’ve lived all over the Western world and worked professionally in Hong Kong and Japan. Thinking on my experiences, I believe that if anything in the Pax Americana inspired the envy of the world, and the affection of Americans, it was the post-war golden age of America’s middle class far more than its immense military might or economic influence. I would also venture that few now would believe that when I first visited the USA in 1965 tax rates ranged from 14-75%, reflecting how much closer America was then than it is now to Theodore Roosevelt’s republican ideal, conceived to combat the excesses of another gilded age:
The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government. Not only should he recognize this obligation in the way he leads his daily life and in the way he earns and spends his money, but it should also be recognized by the way in which he pays for the protection the State gives him.
Second, I’m deeply concerned about surging nationalism both in America and Europe that is causing western nations to turn inward. I was nearly 40 when I moved to the US. The America to which I brought my family in the 1980s was open, confident, and warming. Those qualities have been eroded because the middle class has lost its optimism, and in relative terms, its economic clout. It’s disheartening to see so many political campaigns unable to offer a platform other than to exploit middle-class pessimism and insecurity. These reactionary trends, characterized by waves of anti-establishment politicians, not only aggravate demographic anxieties and amplify divisive voices. They absorb our politics in petty partisanship, distracting our focus away from critical, urgent problems that require systemic or long-term solutions. All this demands an appropriate intervention to intercede on behalf of the middle classes.
Third, the Adams Institute plan is an example of a systemic solution: One that I think would facilitate that condition essential for solving all the others: Domestic political stability. To be sure, I’m not a political economist. My first doctorate was in veterinary science, my second in cardiac electrophysiology. My day job is translating complex pathophysiological and radiological findings into workable gene therapies or surgical procedures for unmet medical need and rare diseases. The long horizons of drug development have led increasingly to my studying and writing about potential solutions to other long term global, ecological, and health problems such as the dispersion of micro plastics and their metabolic effects, and the interaction between global climate change, population fertility rates, and migration dynamics. My perspective is global; and how to generate strategies and effective actions that are decades long and independent of political cycle times (constitution-like), before we break the planetary mold. Despite this difference in particulars, I am drawn to the Institute’s plan by this general principle: There is a category of macro problems that require macro solutions. Wealth concentration is one. And I would cite the Adams Institute’s proposed median-top household wealth ratio as an example of the next-level macro policy thinking that is necessary to tackle a myriad of interrelated complex global crises whose dimensions transcend national borders. After all, the ratio approach need not be limited to serving only America’s middle class; all nations can adopt their own ratio in pursuit of their own median-benchmarked equilibrium.
I endorse the Adams Institute’s plan because I believe that the positive feedback loops that would arise from renewing our middle classes – both from the standpoint of promoting the general welfare, and more specifically in liberating our democratic processes and our scientific minds from the faction and polarization which cripple them – would be infinite.
Michael O’Callaghan, DVM, MScV, PhD
Sherborn, Massachusetts
