Fighting to make the richest NY companies and people fund the basic needs of everyone else

Looming over the New York state budget process this year is the threat of massive cuts in federal assistance from a GOP-led, Donald Trump-loyal Congress, which would force the state to shore up more of its own revenues for healthcare, housing and more. Since 2011, the group Strong Economy for All – which knits together several large unions and community groups statewide to push for tax-the-rich, fund-human-services budgets and laws – has had a hand in pushing for budgets whose priorities are often to the left of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and current Gov. Kathy Hochul. 

Mike Kink, the group's executive director since its founding, talked to New York Nonprofit Media about the work he does, the successes and challenges his group has seen and why he thinks that if Gov. Hochul really linked arms with other New York leaders, they could present a united front against a variety of Trump threats.

Mike, thanks for talking today. There's so much going on politically right now on both the state and federal level, let's jump right into what's on your plate. 

My main focus right now is the federal stuff. I'm involved in a lot of the fightback against the Trump and Republican budget, against Wall Street and billionaires. We need money to fund education, healthcare, housing – things regular people need to make it.

Connect the federal situation right now to the New York state budget situation.

According to a memo last November from the Fiscal Policy Institute, New York currently gets about $86.5 billion in direct funding from the federal government every year – about 35% of its total budget. We have hundreds of thousands of federal workers and probably even millions of workers who live in local economies where federal workers are really important. So mass federal budget cuts and layoffs will decimate the New York City metro and upstate economies. The threats right now to healthcare, Medicaid and subsidies for private [Affordable Care Act] insurance – all of those things are directly aimed at New York. 

And Trump and the Republicans are doing things that in some cases single out New York and other blue states for worse treatment – like the federal money for Medicaid expansion [since the ACA was passed in 2010]. New York is one of a handful of states with the highest Medicaid use. More than a quarter of the population is on the program. So if we lose things like that, it blows up the state budget but also household budgets.

New York is a rich state, though. Could we soldier through?

If they impose these cuts, there'll be such devastation and damage for regular people that state officials will have no choice other than to step up. We've worked over the past five years to put together a package of [proposed] legislation that could raise as much as $42 billion a year for the state by taxing only the wealthiest corporations and individual New Yorkers. It would draw most of its revenue from multimillionaires and billionaires. 

And we have a couple of wealth tax proposals: One would adjust the low tax rate for capital gains at the federal level and another would make billionaires pay income tax on the increases in their investment portfolios. We have a proposal for a real tax on heirs and heiresses of the richest families. Right now, Ivanka Trump is going to inherit a ton of money tax-free. Emma and Georgina Bloomberg will be multibillionaires and Michael Bloomberg will never have paid any taxes on the increased value of his holdings. The billionaire class specializes in tax avoidance, but you can do things at the state level to make those people pay. 

And on corporate taxes, our New York state corporate tax would tax corporations that do business in New York even if they're not headquartered here. For just one example, Exxon Mobil is based in Texas but they sell a shit-ton of gasoline in New York and we can increase their taxes on their corporate profits. And this does not mean destroying small businesses in New York. It would only apply to the biggest, richest corporations. We'd make them pay more. Right now our corporate tax rate is lower than in New Jersey and  Pennsylvania. If we want to raise real money to protect people, we have options. 

Hochul, a corporate centrist Democrat, has been reluctant to support stuff like that. If New York state saw big cuts in federal help, would she then have more leverage to do it?

I think she would have to. But at least for this moment, our focus is on stopping the big federal cuts from happening. If three of the Republican House members in New York said they weren't going to vote to take Medicaid away from hundreds of thousands of their constituents, the Republican bill would not pass. Reps. Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, Nick LaLota, Andrew Garbarino – all of them have huge numbers of people who rely on Medicaid and food assistance. That's why we're trying to delay the federal budget process, so we can help all those reps' constituents understand that their rep is either going to destroy funding for their healthcare and their public schools or not. They're either going to fire a bunch of teachers, nurses and healthcare workers or they're not. And we honestly hope they won't. 

Right. So let's talk about your job. If we met at a party, how would you explain what you do and how you've had impact?

I'd say I run a coalition of labor unions and community organizing groups that work for economic, social and racial justice. We work in Albany and Washington to tax the rich, raise the minimum wage, build power for organized workers and communities and fight the corporations and billionaires that are trying to take everything that regular people produce just to get richer. 

We've been involved in every budget and tax campaign at the state level since 2011. We helped push Andrew Cuomo to tax the millionaires when he swore he'd fight it like his father fought the death penalty. We joined with The Fight for $15 to win historic wage gains for fast food and nail salon workers. We worked to build and support Occupy Wall Street and have worked with allies since then to build that narrative of fighting against extreme inequality. 

In Albany in 2021, we won the biggest increase in taxes and revenues derived from rich people and corporations in the last 25 years. Those tax bills are currently raising over $10 billion a year for the state budget, which are more than twice what was expected. It's put a big floor under funding for healthcare and education. That money also helped fund all the workers who were left out of the pandemic federal stimulus checks – immigrants, people who worked in the informal economy – even though they were the ones working and dying. Some of those people got $14,000 checks—real money for people who were in real need. 

During the Trump fightback in 2017, we worked with groups from all over the country to prevent the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and helped to make the first Trump tax bill the most unpopular piece of legislation that Republicans have done in this century. All of America knew it was a giveaway to billionaires and corporations and, as a result, the Democrats won historic gains in Congress in 2018. 

What's the structure of your group—the funding, the staffing, etc.?

We've always worked with a lean staff and have been a conduit for funding that allows us to support work by other groups such as Make the Road NY and NY Communities for Change. We’re just me, the executive director, and my longtime deputy director Charles Khan, a true New Yorker. We have an incredible working relationship. 

We're also affiliated with Popular Democracy, the national network of community organizing groups—and as part of that work, we help lead tax and budget work all over the country, both state and federal. 

Our support primarily comes from big unions like 1199 SEIU, NYSUT and 32BJ SEIU. It's fine with us if the unions and community groups get the attention instead of us. Having union support has been fantastic in terms of not having to compete with our community partners for philanthropic funds. Sometimes we lead campaigns and sometimes we just advise.

How did you get to this place in your career—and why? What's the through-line?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and always wanted to do antipoverty and racial and social justice work. I was an organizer and a DJ in college. After law school, I clerked for a magistrate judge in the Southern District, then did five years at the Harlem office of Legal Aid. I wanted to learn from the bottom up in a low-income neighborhood and did tons cases on eviction, disability, kids with lead poisoning, gay partners [pre-gay marriage or domestic partnership laws] who didn't have tenancy rights.

Then I went to the [large AIDS and homelessness nonprofit] Housing Works for 13 years [Editor’s note: the interviewer worked with Kink at Housing Works from 2005 to 2006], first as senior staff attorney, then I opened the Albany advocacy office, where we did statewide organizing with homeless people with AIDS and HIV. And then I hired someone to run the Washington office.

Then I was recruited to work in the state government when the Democrats took over the Senate in 2009 and 2010. I oversaw the legal and policy staff working for the Democrats. But I wasn't particularly interested in staying on once they lost the majority in 2011. 

That's when I set up Strong Economy for All, with UFT, 1199 and Communities for Change, as a coalition to fight Cuomo from the left and set up narratives of extreme inequality. It was a good match for me because the work included a range of things from policy and legislative work to research, writing, direct action, civil disobedience – all the things I liked and knew how to do. It was how we knit together unions and community groups to push Cuomo in a more progressive direction.

What's a typical day like?

There are absolutely no typical days. I'm either working from my home in western Massachusetts or I'm in Albany at the Capitol or in the offices of unions and community groups. With this recent ramp-up of the federal fight, I could open my eyes in the morning and look at my phone and have over 100 messages on a handful of Signal chains and dozens of emails. I spend a big part of the day running big Zoom calls, sometimes with more than 3,000 people. The main Zooms and meetings peter out in the early evening but the kind of people I work with are very driven and some days don't really end until 10 to 10:30 p.m.

What part of your work are you best at? What comes easiest to you?

I like connecting people. I like helping organizations that need guidance and knitting together groups into a campaign that really works. I'm older now. Sometimes my job is not to be the boss but to provide counsel. I like to write talking points. Sometimes my job is to read the big policy reports and boil them down to a few bullets on one page. I like working with artists and creative people to put messaging together in vibrant ways. 

What part of the work is most challenging?

I'm most comfortable being in a group of people who are ready to go and do stuff, who then take a rest and then go and do stuff again. I'm not so great on managerial administrative leadership stuff like formal supervision and feedback. I want to work with people in the moment, collaborate, be honest and connect. 

When we started Strong Economy for All, Bob Master from the union Communication Workers of America said, "I don't want another board meeting to go to, another gala fundraiser. I think we should be mean and lean and try to have an impact." I really appreciated that. I go to a lot of fundraisers for our member organizations but I don't throw them for us. So I've managed to have a job where my weaknesses are not devastating.

Great. So let's talk about the New York state budget that seems headed to be in the can in April.  There are three versions now – the state Senate's, the Assembly's and Hochul's. What in those budgets are you pro and con on?

The main point is that none of them fully prepare for the impact of devastating federal cuts that we all know are coming. As an advocate, I say that we have to tax the motherfucking rich and prepare our state for these cuts by piling up money for healthcare, education and housing. But politically, I can understand how the governor and legislative leaders want to see how bad it's gonna get before responding. I fully expect there will be a special session in Albany once the cuts happen. That's when things are going to get real and turn super life-and-death.

I also think the budget should include The EMPIRE Act, which would broaden the effort to enforce labor protections at a time when Trump is destroying regulatory agencies and we know that cuts are coming to federal labor law enforcement. The act would let unions jump in with the state Department of Labor to enforce wage-theft claims, which could raise $100 million for the state. 

In terms of the state Senate and Assembly budgets as they currently exist, both would provide some significant increase on taxes for millionaires, billionaires and the richest corporations. I hope that the governor will agree to accept them as part of the preparation [for federal cuts]. 

Where would and wouldn't you give Hochul points as governor so far?

I've honestly been disappointed in her. When she was about to take office, I cowrote an op-ed for The Times-Union laying out all the ways that she really could meet the moment on a range of things where Cuomo had been corrupt and double-dealing. Like taxing the rich, which is supported by a majority of Americans and New Yorkers. Even a majority of Republicans say that our state should have a minimum wage over $20. These are not hard calls. So it's disappointing that, instead, she has sucked up to the business class and big corporations. She raised more money from a small subset of Wall Street and real estate millionaires and billionaires in her first 90 days than Cuomo raised in 12 years.

This may sound naive, but why is she that way?

She was a conservative, Blue Dog-type Democrat, a one-term member of Congress who lost her reelection and was then hired as a lobbyist for the biggest bank in western New York until she became lieutenant governor. She's always been tied to big corporations and has always been ideologically conservative, such as opposing giving undocumented immigrants driver's licenses so they could get to and from work. In a prior era, she'd have been a Rockefeller Republican, supporting women's rights but also super pro-business. 

Earlier this year, her polling was below Trump's. Now that Trump has started destroying things, she's started to fight back. When Trump said to her basically "I'm the king" in opposing congestion pricing for New York, she got more aggressive in her rhetoric. But policy-wise, there's more room for her to stand up for her state. As things get dire with the federal government, her attempt to be a moderate is just not the right move. Other governors, like Janet Mills in Maine and JB Pritzker in Illinois, are standing up harder for their people. 

A few days ago, Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said that he would flood New York state with ICE agents if Hochul didn't cooperate with the administration's detention and deportation goals. Isn't that a serious threat to tread carefully around?

If Hochul worked with [state Attorney General] Tish James and other stalwart politicians around the state – that's the right way to approach these fights.

How much longer do you want to do this work for? Do you have any major goals you'd like to achieve before leaving?

There's an obscure provision in the state constitution from the 1930s that effectively bars a wealth tax that is just a flat-rate percentage of your wealth. I would think a ballot proposition to get rid of that would get 95% of the vote. That's a secret aspiration of mine. I don't know if and when the circumstances would be right for that, but I do think that getting rid of that would be a nice thing to do in someone's lifetime. I just don't know if it'll be in mine.