But in a segment from 2014, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver made a strong case against state-backed lotteries like the Powerball.

Among Oliver’s more startling findings is that Americans spend more on lotteries than the NFL, video games, music, movie tickets, Major League Baseball, and pornography combined. “Which basically means Americans spent more on the lottery than they spent on America,” he quipped.

“Which basically means Americans spent more on the lottery than they spent on America”

States sell their lotteries as harmless games that promote the social good by providing money to schools.

But Oliver emphasizes what can be so easy to forget amid all those ads: Lotteries are gambling, and they can create the same kind of painful addiction that any casino can. Lotteries are also in the business of selling hope to people — particularly low-income people — despite having astoundingly low odds of winning. Indeed, studies have found that lottery sales are correlated with both unemployment and poverty rates.

The result is a state program that essentially runs on false hope: Despite the extremely low chances of winning, state-run lotteries make people feel like they have a chance to strike rich and help schools in the process.

“Gambling is a little like alcohol: Most people like it, some are addicted to it, and it’s not like the state can or should outlaw it altogether,” Oliver said. “But it would be a little strange if the state was in the liquor business, advertising it by claiming that every shot of vodka you drink helps schoolchildren learn.”

What is a streetcar?

The streetcar is a mode of public transportation that is having a major comeback. It involves running short electric trains along tracks in the roadway. Some operate by connecting to an electric cable overhead. While popular in the early 1900s in the US, streetcars’ popularity faded by midcentury. However, after 2000, the streetcar experienced a resurgence in the US, with dozens of cities building and planning new streetcar systems.

The exact definition of streetcar can be a little fuzzy, especially when compared with light rail. In fact, the American Public Transportation Association (an international industry trade group) calls streetcars a type of light rail, though it’s not always that simple. Cities can even mix up which one they’re building.

But generally speaking, a streetcar is a train that runs along rails set into streets, meaning it drives alongside automobiles for much of its journey. This is a photo of a streetcar in Portland’s system.

This makes streetcars different from light rail trains, which tend to have their own tracks, set aside from the road. Below is a shot of the Minneapolis light rail, which for the most part runs on tracks set apart from the roadway.

However, some light rail systems combine on-road tracks and tracks that are separated from cars.

Streetcars also make more stops and tend to cover less distance altogether, with more frequent stops. In addition, streetcars tend to be shorter, single-vehicle trains. Other light rail trains, meanwhile, are often multiple cars long and cover more ground with fewer stops.

The goals of streetcar systems and light rail tends to differ. Light rail routes are generally longer, carrying people in from the suburbs; streetcars tend to be shorter, shuttling people through busy areas of a city.

Light rail, incidentally, is not light as opposed to dark; it’s light as opposed to heavy. Heavy rail systems have a higher passenger capacity than light rail systems and tend to be the subways that many urban commuters are familiar with. Here is an example: one of New York City’s subway trains.

How long have streetcars been around?

In the mid-1800s, horse-drawn streetcars were popular in many cities. New York City claims the first horse-drawn car that ran along rails in the road, with its line opening in 1832. South Bend, Indiana, claims the first electric streetcar in the United States, with a line that opened in 1882. Streetcars were widely popular in the US in the early 1900s, according to the Smithsonian Institution, covering 45,000 miles and carrying millions by 1917.

However, that popularity waned, and the reason for that decline is a subject of some dispute.

Some have argued that auto companies systematically destroyed electric mass public transit. In 1974, the Senate held hearings on this, and Senate counsel Bradford Snell testified that GM had caused the destruction of electric transit in 45 cities. This storyline is often referred to as the “streetcar conspiracy.”

That conspiracy is said to have inspired a plot line in the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” The villain of that film, imaginatively named Judge Doom (played by Christopher Lloyd), buys the Los Angeles streetcar system in order to take it apart and allow cars to take over. The conspiracy story has been repeated in many news articles, as well as in a 1996 PBS documentary.

But many dispute that take, arguing that cities merely chose buses because they were more economical. In an in-depth look at the story in 2003, the Los Angeles Times wrote that “most historians agree that GM and the other mega-companies only helped to speed the end of the railway, which already was deep into red ink.”

But today, decades after streetcars dwindled, there has been a renaissance. Memphis launched a trolley line in 1993, and Portland, Oregon, in 2001 launched the first streetcar line with modern vehicles in the US. After that, streetcars proliferated. Seattle, Tampa, Denver, and Savannah are just a few of the roughly two dozen cities with streetcar systems, and as of 2015 dozens more had streetcars in either in the planning or construction phases.

How big is the current streetcar boom?

The American Public Transportation Association counts 23 existing and operational systems in the US. It also counts 12 projects under construction, though that list includes new lines being added to existing systems. Four streetcar lines are expected to open in 2014: in Atlanta, Tucson, Seattle, and Washington, DC. In Seattle, the new line will be an addition to the city’s existing system, while the other cities will be opening entirely new streetcar systems.

The Seattle streetcar system. (jjukebox/Flickr)

In addition, plenty of other cities are considering starting or growing their streetcar systems. APTA lists 89 US cities in the “active planning” phase, a broad umbrella that includes everything from cities just talking about it to those that have secured funding. While APTA admits its list may not be up to date and may include some plans that have gone inactive, it is nevertheless telling that around 100 cities have seriously considered installing streetcar systems in recent years, and that more than a few are fully operational.

How expensive are streetcars?

Streetcars require large initial capital investments — namely, laying down rails and buying the cars. Cincinnati’s line, proposed in 2007, has been estimated to cost somewhere between $133 million and $148 million for a 3.6-mile track. Milwaukee’s streetcar will cost $64.6 million for around 2 miles of track. Tucson’s streetcar has an estimated cost of $196 million for 3.9 miles.

This is the biggest complaint of streetcar opponents: that systems are simply too expensive for systems that just shuttle people back and forth.

Indeed, they tend to cost a lot more than a bus, another public transit option often compared with streetcars. And buses can largely cover the same routes as streetcars, at comparable speeds to streetcars.

In 2012 and 2013, the average city bus cost a little less than $487,000, according to the American Public Transportation Association. The cost of a streetcar vehicle, meanwhile, can run in the millions. For example, in 2009, the city of Portland paid $20 million for six streetcar vehicles. Even an expensive electric bus is cheaper. Seattle in 2014 reported that these buses could cost the city around $1 million each.

“I tend to approach this — and my bias is I look at this from a transportation point of view, not a quality of life or economic point of view, but from a simple transportation point of view — that a bus service is much more cost-effective,” says Jeffrey Brown, a professor of urban planning at Florida State University.

In other words, buses are usually cheaper if the question is simply about moving people from point A to B.

This fight over cost came to a head in Cincinnati late in 2013, when Mayor John Cranley tried to stop the city’s new streetcar system. Though the city council later overruled him, he still insisted that the system was too expensive.

“I personally don’t have strong passion about the streetcar one way or another,” Cranley told the New York Times. “But I’ve got an $800 million pension liability.”

Streetcars may simply represent a middle way between cheaper buses and much more expensive systems, particularly for cities that are strapped for cash.

“My sense is there’s not a whole lot of money for light rail investments, which are in the order of hundred of millions of dollars to build systems, just because there’s just not a lot of federal money available,” says Brown.

So when a city wants a transit upgrade but doesn’t have the money for a hefty investment like more commuter rail, subway extensions, or light rails that run separate from the road, the streetcar could look like a good compromise … meaning trading away some benefits of those faster systems.

How do streetcar advocates justify the cost of streetcars?

Some advocates say the operating costs of streetcars are lower than buses over time, after the capital costs of putting down tracks. The office of Portland Mayor Charlie Hales, for example, has said the streetcar in that city would cost $1.50 per ride, compared with $2.82 for a bus line. Those longer-term operating costs can be lower in part because streetcars tend to carry far more people than one bus can, and streetcars also don’t require gasoline.

That said, for lower operating costs to offset the high upfront costs could take a very long time given the high price of streetcar construction.

In addition, advocates argue that streetcar vehicles don’t usually have to be replaced as often as buses. A 2007 study from the Federal Transit Administration found that large buses have a minimum useful life of 12 years, noting that many city transit authorities move to retire these buses after that period, rather than stretching out the buses’ lives. United Streetcar, an Oregon company that builds the vehicles, says the cars last 30 years. And if a streetcar is given its own dedicated lane, it can go faster than traffic (though it still has to deal with streetlights …€” and a bus in a dedicated lane would go just about as fast).

Advocates also say that streetcars confer all sorts of other benefits, like being environmentally friendly, giving cities a “sense of place,” and boosting economic development.

How are streetcars funded?

Cities have a few ways of funding streetcars. One is government. They can get money from local, state, or federal government, as well as local businesses or other sources (though state funding is rare). Local funding can come from a variety of places: raising taxes, selling bonds, or adding surcharges on to things like car registrations. Federal funding often comes from competitive grants, with cities applying to the Department of Transportation and vying with each other for precious funds.

The mix of funding varies widely from city to city. Milwaukee’s streetcar, for example, will rely primarily upon federal grants, according to the streetcar’s website —€” nearly $55 million of the nearly $65 million initial route will come from the federal government.

Meanwhile, of the estimated $148 million in funding for Cincinnati’s streetcar, only around 30 percent will come from Washington. The rest will come from a variety of sources, including local taxes, private sources, and selling land.

The bulk of one Seattle streetcar line, meanwhile, came from a business improvement district — a group of businesses that pay higher taxes in order to raise money for particular projects (like streetcars).

The fact that streetcars are typically financed in part through special revenue measures that may not have been available for bus projects helps explain why this more expensive option is sometimes preferred over a thriftier bus.

Why do cities want streetcars?

Advocates have a whole list of arguments for why cities should build streetcar lines. Here are a few of them.

Tourists like them

“The ride quality and accessibility of a streetcar is an advantage over buses,” says Ethan Mellone, rail transit manager of Seattle’s streetcar. He adds that tourists prefer streetcars to buses because streetcars tend to be less intimidating and more understandable for a newcomer.

“[On a streetcar], riders are not going to wind up where they didn’t expect to be. They attract more riders than a comparable bus line,” he says.

Portland is one example of this: Bus lines near the streetcar line saw ridership drop by 20 percent, and the streetcar’s ridership more than made up for it, Politifact reports.

Developers like them

It’s hard to find hard evidence on this, as the Atlantic Cities noted last year, but advocates argue that putting in a streetcar draws economic development because streetcars are more permanent than a new bus line: Once the track is laid, it’s not going anywhere.

“When you have that route in place, and it’s going to stop here for a long time because they spent some time putting that infrastructure in and putting that station in, [entrepreneurs say], ‘Here’s a good place to build our business or our restaurant,'” says Art Guzzetti, vice president for policy at the American Public Transportation Association.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution recently reported that more than $700 million in development was either underway or would be completed by the end of 2014. And one 2008 study found the Portland streetcar would spur $778 million in development. Tucson has reported similarly booming development.

The environment

Streetcars are electric, and many buses still operate on diesel or gasoline. For cities trying to go green, this can make a streetcar line look attractive. Then again, the question is what you’re comparing streetcars to. After all, buses are already a green alternative to cars (think one bus carrying 20 people versus 20 cars carrying 20 people).

The Obama administration likes them

The Department of Transportation under President Obama changed the formula for how funds for different projects are allocated. Rather than focus purely on cost-effectiveness, says a department spokesperson, the DOT has been focusing on other factors, like boosting economic development.

Though the new DOT focus has given a boost to streetcars, it’s important to recognize that this money never funds a streetcar fully, says one expert.

“[The streetcar] has been an emphasis of the current administration in their policy view, and yes they have directed funds to degrees toward these projects,” says Guzzetti. “But the regions themselves are putting forth the bulk of the investment.”

Cities appreciate the investments and say that Washington has seen the light when it comes to transit.

“The feds realize that if they want to rebuild cities … that as a kick-start or jump-start, federal funds are the way to go,” says Tim Borchers, executive director of the Atlanta streetcar.

Jobs

Buying a regular city bus means, well, just buying a regular city bus and putting it into service. Starting a streetcar line means all sorts of building, like tracks and stations. Yes, it’s expensive, but those expenses can create local jobs, not to mention earn political support from labor groups and contracting firms.

Je ne sais quoi

One other common argument is that streetcars just add a special something to a neighborhood.

“What makes an urban lifestyle attractive is there’s a sense of place, a sense of activity, and you can see it. And that’s part of what streetcars are,” says Guzzetti.

Are streetcars just a fad?

While there’s no way of really knowing, one thing that bodes well for streetcars is the overall growth in public transit usage. In 2013, US public transit had its highest ridership since 1956, according to the American Public Transportation Association. But since then, public transit ridership has climbed considerably, meaning a growing potential customer base for streetcars.

In addition, streetcars are built specifically to not be fads. Putting rails in roadways takes time and effort and money, and they’re hard to get out. This is one of the streetcar’s advantages relative to a bus, advocates say, as it signals to businesses that they’ll want to build along a transit line that will be around for years to come.

However, given some of streetcars’ weaknesses as a transportation method — they’re not terribly fast, they have to navigate traffic — and the growth in the use of public transit, it’s possible that cities that build the systems will one day wish they had gone for either costlier grade-separated light rail or cheaper and more practical buses.

What else should I be reading?

The American Public Transportation Association has a site where it keeps all sorts of information on modern streetcars and heritage trolleys. There are also many good public transit-focused blogs out there. Human Transit and the Transport Politic are two good ones.

In addition, the Atlantic Cities — while covering all sorts of urban planning-related news — often writes thoughtful articles on transportation policy.

Many cities that have a streetcar under consideration or under construction also have blogs or sites dedicated to those streetcars where progress updates are posted. A few examples are Washington, DC’s site, Milwaukee’s, and Seattle’s.

How have these cards changed?

This is a running list of substantive updates, corrections, and additions to this card stack. These cards were last updated on April 22, 2014.

• April 22: Card 8 was corrected to reflect that transit reached its highest ridership in 2013 since 1956.
• April 23: Card 1 was corrected to better define heavy rail.

Barack Obama says critics of the trade deal, TPP, should look at the facts. Elizabeth Warren fired back on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, accusing the White House of keeping those very facts a secret.

Warren’s appearance on MSNBC was in response to the president’s own MSNBC segment on Tuesday, in which he called Warren’s TPP stance “wrong.”

“When you hear folks make a lot of suggestions about how bad this trade deal is, when you dig into the facts, they are wrong,” he said.

Warren’s response gets at one of the deepest criticisms of trade deals generally: they are largely negotiated in private. As a senator, Warren can review text as it’s negotiated. But she can’t share what’s happening with the public.

“It’s the case that the president says he wants the American people to judge this deal based on the facts, but to do that, he’s got to make the deal public. Otherwise the American people can’t judge it on the facts. He won’t put the facts out there,” she said. She added that Congress shouldn’t “grease the skids” of such a secretive deal by approving fast-track legislation, under which Congress would give the 12 TPP nations’ agreed-upon treaty text an up-or-down vote, with no amendments.

Warren’s comments came just hours after the Senate Finance Committee approved fast-track legislation, however, putting the administration one step closer to getting its massive trade deal passed.

Warren is perhaps the most vocal of Obama’s TPP opposition in Congress, much of which is coming from members of his own party — progressive Congress members including Warren, as well as Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders.

Why the administration keeps the text secret

Trade deals are negotiated unlike normal US legislation. The deal is supposed to be kept secret during the process for strategic reasons. From the US’s perspective, it lets negotiators go into the room without showing their hand.

But of course, nothing is locked in a vault. Early, leaked drafts suggest that the deal is tipped in favor of big corporations and other groups with specific interests. That looks bad for the White House, and it has substantive problems, too.

This deal is sweeping, covering a wide variety of areas like intellectual property and environmental concerns, and it won’t have the benefit of public scrutiny before the nations agree on it. Ohio State law professor Margot Kaminski put it best at the New York Times the other week: “Because the negotiating process combines a general shield from the public with privileged access for industry advisers, the substance of American free trade agreements does not represent truly national interests. “

The dilemma on fast-track

If Congress passes fast-track legislation, it means that once the administration negotiates a deal, Congress can only give it an up-or-down vote, without making any amendments.

There is a good argument for fast-track — namely, that it’s simply too hard to negotiate a deal with other countries if they know the US could change it after the fact. But as with secrecy, there are also great arguments against it — that it won’t allow Americans’ elected representatives much of a say in how that already-secretly-negotiated agreement eventually looks.

To be fair, we do have some information on what’s in the TPP: the USTR has published its TPP negotiating objectives. And the administration often points to its nearly 1,700 TPP meetings on Capitol Hill, a way of emphasizing that the deal isn’t secret to Congress members themselves.

And the administration also emphasizes that, should Congress pass fast-track authority, the deal will be public for 60 days, and Congress can only vote on it 30 days after that period has ended, as the New York Times reports.

But combine the secrecy and fast-track, and you can see why some members of Congress are concerned. There are likely to be things that benefit Americans in the TPP — American farmers, for example, are excited about having more open markets for their goods. But leaked chapters indicate that parts could hurt lots of people, like if pharmaceutical companies make it more difficult to produce generic drugs. Whatever good and bad things the closed-door negotiations have combined into a trade pact, fast-track will require Congress to vote up or down all at once, taking the bad with the good.

This isn’t to say a trade pact won’t be a compromise — that comes with pretty much any international agreement. But TPP as the Obama administration wants it will involve layering together two processes that go against the normal, transparent way of passing laws in the US. That’s the uncomfortable problem at the center of the TPP fight, and it’s a big part of why Obama finds himself at odds with his own party.

WATCH: ‘Meet the enormous boats that carry supplies’

As the fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership rages on Capitol Hill, President Obama is finding himself increasingly playing defense against attacks from his own party. In a Tuesday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the president struck back at Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the most vocal opponents of the trade deal the administration is currently negotiating, covering a broad range of issues including tariffs, environmental standards, and intellectual property.

“I love Elizabeth. We’re allies on a whole host of issues, but she’s wrong on this,” he said.

Warren is one of the loudest voices among a chorus of progressives who argue that the TPP would send US jobs overseas, primarily benefit corporations, and threaten US sovereignty. Obama struck back at those notions in Tuesday’s interview.

“I would not be doing this trade deal if I did not think it was good for the middle class,” he told Matthews. “And when you hear folks make a lot of suggestions about how bad this trade deal is, when you dig into the facts, they are wrong.”

The TPP would be a massive trade deal, bringing together 12 nations that together account for around 40 percent of global GDP. And the battle over TPP is growing fiercer these days, as Congress prepares to decide whether to give the president trade promotion authority, also known as “fast-track.”
If they do, it means that once the 12 TPP nations reach an agreement, Congress will give it an up-or-down vote, with no amendments. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden have introduced trade promotion authority legislation in the Senate, and the House Committee on Ways and Means will hold a Wednesday hearing on trade promotion authority, as well.

While Obama has some Democrat allies like Wyden on the Hill, Warren is also one of many progressives who oppose Obama on TPP — for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid have both spoken out against it, as well as the labor unions whose funding powers many Democratic campaigns. The AFL-CIO recently protested fast-track by stopping its PACs from donating to congressional campaigns until after a trade promotion authority vote.

Richard Trumka truly hates the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Once you get him talking about the massive trade deal, the head of the AFL-CIO is by turns furious and incredulous that it could soon be in force. Even when he’s not talking, he’s voicing his opposition — when he shows you photos of his grandson, it’s impossible to miss the sticker emblazoned in big letters on the back of his phone: “STOP FAST TRACK,” in opposition to the bill the Obama administration wants Congress to pass in order to ease the passage of the trade pact.

The TPP has created some strange bedfellows: the Obama administration has found itself with many GOP allies in promoting the trade deal, while unions and liberals like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders staunchly oppose it. Vox spoke with Trumka recently about why he opposes the pact and what he thinks needs to be done to fix it.

What unions want from the TPP

The AFL-CIO has a variety of problems with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, problems with both the substance of the agreement and the process by which it is being negotiated. When I asked Trumka to lay out these basics for me, he listed his main concerns:

“One, it fails to address currency manipulation. Currency manipulation … has or will cost us between 2.3 million and 5.8 million jobs. China leads that group. Twenty countries have been determined to have manipulated their currency. And yet there’s nothing in the agreement to stop it. So all of the benefits they claim we could get from TPP, even if you assume every one of the benefits is right, could be wiped out the next day by a country manipulating its currency, to negate all this.

“Two, it has the ISDS [investor-state dispute settlement] secret tribunals that are only available to foreign investors, and it thus encourages people to send jobs and money offshore. Because think about this: people invested here in the past because we had a safe, defined system and a rule of law. If they can now get that in Vietnam because of ISDS, they will send their money to Vietnam and send their products back here. The reason why countries would develop a rule of law is because of the pressure of non-investment. This eliminates that pressure, so it would slow down the migration in these countries to a real rule of law.

“Same with environmental standards. It fails to address climate change in any way, so that encourages people to go outside. Here’s why: if it doesn’t have the same targets or the same cooperative agreements that are just as strong as the US-China bilateral deal, it encourages them to go elsewhere so they don’t have to comply with our carbon emissions standards in this country.

“It also fails to help create jobs here because it doesn’t have strong rules of origin,” Trumka says. In other words, Trumka fears that Chinese companies could put factories in a TPP country like Vietnam or ship raw materials to a TPP country for assembly, which would give China the preferential access to US markets provided by the TPP without having to follow the TPP itself.

“It prohibits things like Buy American policies. Say the taxpayers in Minneapolis decide they want to use their money to do something and they want to make it a Minnesota product, that violates this trade agreement, and it can be negated.

“And the last thing is transparency. This is an agreement that’s going to cover 40 percent of the world’s GDP. It’s going to be NAFTA and [the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement] on steroids. And yet they want to be able to do it in secret, plunk it down, and have Congress vote up or down with no amendments,” says Trumka.

The effort to stop fast-track

The AFL-CIO’s PACs recently stopped all donations to Congress members’ campaigns as a way to protest Trade Promotion Authority, also known as “fast-track.” The legislation would also pledge Congress to only give the pact an up-or-down vote, without amending it, once the 12 countries in the TPP reach a final agreement. The legislation would also establish guidelines the Obama administration would have to follow in negotiating

Trumka explains that the donation freeze is not only about drawing attention to the fight but about making the most of the AFL-CIO’s financial power.

“We did it so we could conserve all the resources that we would normally give out for the fight against fast track and against TPP. So whenever the fight’s over, whatever’s left, we’ll open our PACs up again,” he says, regardless of how Congress ends up voting on TPA.

Trumka adds that he thinks it has been a successful strategy so far: “I think it’s gotten people’s attention that this is a serious issue to us, that we’re taking it seriously and we are going to fight as hard as we can because the stakes are so high and there’s so much for the American worker to lose.”

He also says the AFL-CIO is not opposed to all trade liberalization; rather, it’s opposed to ones they consider detrimental to workers’ interests: “We’re opposed to bad trade deals, not trade deals.”

I pushed back on his opposition to fast-track, pointing out that it could be too hard to negotiate a trade deal with other countries if they knew Congress could change the deal after the fact.

“I get the argument. But Bill Clinton didn’t have fast-track. And he negotiated a whole string of agreements,” Trumka said.

When Trumka refers to a “string of agreements,” he is in fact talking about one agreement: the Jordan Free Trade Agreement, which Congress approved in 2000.

It’s true that Clinton didn’t have fast-track authority for much of his presidency, but he did have it at the start, and that is when he negotiated (and Congress passed) NAFTA, the biggest trade agreement of his presidency. After fast-track expired in mid-1994, Clinton pushed for TPA to be reapproved, to no avail.

But Trumka’s bigger problem with fast-track is that he considers it undemocratic.

“If you can’t get it passed because people get to debate it and amend it, then it’s probably a bad piece of legislation that shouldn’t be passed, because it doesn’t meet the needs of the American people,” he said. “[The administration’s] whole theory is that any agreement is better than no agreement. And that’s simply not the truth.”

In fact, Trumka says the AFL-CIO wouldn’t accept fast-track under any circumstances. When I asked him if his organization would approve of TPA if the pact contained everything that unions wanted, he gave an emphatic no:

“We’re opposed to fast track. It’s too important a decision and it affects too many lives of too many people for too long to be done in the dark and then plunk something out of the dark, a thousand-page treaty, and say, ‘Vote it up or down with no amendments.’ We think that’s the most undemocratic thing you can do. We think that’s dangerous.”

What about China?

One of the administration’s biggest selling points on the TPP has to do with a country that’s not even a part of the pact: China. The argument is that if the US doesn’t act first, China will “write the rules” for trade in the eastern Asia region.

When I asked Trumka about this argument, he described it as “almost laughable.”

“It gives China an entrée into our market, because there are bad rules of origin,” Trumka said. “So China can get all the benefits of an agreement without doing anything.

“So this isn’t going to change the way [Asian countries] do business. China’s market of proximity is closer to them than we are. They’re still going to do everything the same way.”

China is negotiating its own trade pact in Asia, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. The Obama administration’s argument for TPP is this: one way or another, there will soon be a big trade deal that integrates all of these Asian nations together — either TPP or RCEP. The question is which economic superpower will be driving it, as my colleague Ezra Klein wrote recently. If the US is, it will force smaller countries like Vietnam to adopt higher labor standards. If China is, those standards could be lower. But when I asked Trumka about this, he argued that higher wages in Vietnam are a matter for Vietnam to decide.

“This agreement won’t change that. Vietnam’s minimum wage is still 65 cents an hour. They don’t have to increase it at all. They have to comply with what they currently have,” he said. (In fact, Vietnam’s minimum wage is set at $11.80 to $18.90 a month, which can be as low as 7 cents an hour for a worker putting in 40 hours a week.)

His biggest problem is with the administration framing the trade agreement as an anti-China foreign policy.

“Look, if you want to do a geopolitical agreement to circumvent China, do it. But call it geopolitical. Don’t call it a trade agreement,” he says.

Labor groups have been opposed to TPP for years. (Getty Images)

Should currency manipulation be in the TPP?

Trumka had earlier framed his opposition to currency manipulation in terms of China. I asked him how this agreement could change things if China is not in the TPP.

“It’s not just them,” he responded. “There are 19 other countries, including the ones in this agreement.”

He added, “We could stop China. We gave them permanent normal trade relations with us. We could take that away and say, ‘Until you agree with us on a currency manipulation provision, we’re not going to do that.’ And we didn’t even propose one in this agreement.”

One recent argument made about currency manipulation right now is that it’s a “poison pill,” and that including it now would scuttle the entire deal. Trumka laughed at this argument.

“Wait a second. That’s the most spurious argument of all. We raised this two years ago. We raised it 23 months ago, 22 months ago, 21 months ago, 20 months ago. [Froman’s] the one who didn’t advance it. So now to say ‘It’s too late in the game to advance it now’? That’s laughable.”

Is the AFL-CIO worrying too much?

The argument over TPP isn’t just between those who are for and against it. It’s also an argument over how beneficial (or detrimental) it will really be to the economy. The Brookings Institution’s David Wessel has written that he thinks the AFL-CIO’s TPP opposition seems unnecessarily strong, considering that the pact will, in his opinion, have only a modest economic impact. Trumka believes that analysis is wrong, and that the pact will in fact rob US workers of jobs and wages.

“We’re going into [trade] deficit after deficit. Each one of those billions [of dollars] takes jobs out of this country. It hasn’t raised our wages or the wages of our trading partners. It stagnated them or lowered them,” he says.

“We’ve lost 60,000 factories since the year 2000. Here’s what happens: when you lose industries, you lose the R&D that go along with those. You lose the cutting edge, we’re no longer the leader in anything. That’s the danger.

“And so when David Wessel says he doesn’t get it, of course he doesn’t get it. He hasn’t been affected. He’s still making the same salary. His standard of living hasn’t been lowered. He hasn’t seen the tax base of his community get destroyed because of trade deals.”

There is some evidence that TPP could boost the economy — one Peterson Institute study, for example, suggests the economy would grow slightly with this deal. But Trumka says that doesn’t mean much for workers.

“If GDP improves 20 percent and wages stay flat, so what?” Trumka responded. “That doesn’t help the American worker. We’ve seen GDP go up, but wages have been flat. Why are wages flat?”

I pointed out that one could attribute these middle-class wage declines more to other factors, like automation.

“That’s only a small portion of it. Do you actually believe that automation has stagnated wages?” he responded. “We had automation since the turn of the century, at a much faster rate than we have it now. Did it stagnate wages? No. In fact, from 1946 to 1973, productivity in the country doubled, and so did wages … despite the technology. Not because of it; despite it.”

What happens now?

The US has been in TPP negotiations for years, and the Senate appears close to an agreement on a fast-track deal. With a potential end to the TPP saga in sight, I asked Trumka how hopeful he is for how the pact will turn out.

“I started off almost two years ago very hopeful,” he says. “We spent literally hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing ways to make TPP work for working people. We gave [US Trade Rep. Michael Froman] over 200 of those suggested changes — some little, some big, some medium-sized. Collectively they would have made a great agreement.

“So far, only four or five have only made their way onto the bargaining table. Now, they’re about to close out negotiations. I don’t expect that Froman is going to lay down 195 of those changes right now and say, ‘I want these as well.’ So as each day goes on and they agree to each new chapter, my level of hope wanes.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.