Divisiveness and Star Trek Discovery

I don’t need to tell you that America is a divided place right now.  Red states vs. blue states; anthem standers vs. kneelers; smooth peanut butter vs. chunky.  But it used to be there was something most of us could agree on, and that is that Star Trek is awesome.

But the Star Trek concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) is being strained by the response of fans to the latest incarnation in the Trek oeuvre, Star Trek Discovery.  CBS just announced that it was renewing the show for a second season, so the experiment of only making it available on a streaming platform instead of broadcast television must have worked.  But there is a civil war brewing about the show and the direction of Star Trek into the future.

I cannot comment on the quality of the show because I won’t sign up for CBS All Access just to watch a new Star Trek series.  I can go back and re-watch The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine on Netflix if I want my Trek fix (sorry, Voyager was never my cup of tea), not to mention the movies (at least the good, even numbered ones).  I did watch the first episode that was broadcast, and I thought it was terrible.  Of course, it’s hard for me to make an informed decision because what they showed on CBS was not the first episode, but only the first half of the first two-part episode.  Note to CBS—if you say you are going to show the first episode on broadcast TV, then show the ENTIRE episode and don’t end on a cliffhanger and say, “to be continued” on part 2.

Metacritic gives Star Trek Discovery a respectable critical rating of 72 out of 100.  But then I checked the User Rating and saw it was a measly 4.5 out of 10, worse than mediocre.  Looking at the summary, it was what we in the statistics biz like to call a bimodal distribution—163 negative reviews vs. 82 positive reviews, with all the 10’s and 1’s averaging out to just under 5.  Very few people are on the fence.

I got the sense of the controversy looking at the comments on the AV Club review of the most recent episode.  In my history of reading reviews at AV Club I had never seen so many comments taking issue with the position taken by the reviewer, which pointed out the inconsistencies with the Star Trek universe and questioned the purpose of setting the series in the Star Trek universe then feeling the need to rebrand certain aspects (like largely rebooting the Klingons).  Comments on AV Club reviews sometimes have commenters pose slight disagreements with what other commenters have posted, but rarely have commenters taken the offensive to unilaterally disagree with the approach the reviewer took in critiquing the show itself.

The major reason for the split of opinion could be because we are now into the third generation of Star Trek fandom.  The First Age of Star Trek was the original show and the big screen movie version of Star Trek and its immediate sequels.  These stories were about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest, and were based on a unifyied concept.

The Second Age of Star Trek was the re-birth and rise of the television franchise, from The Next Generation through Enterprise.  These projects were one step removed from Gene Rodenberry’s original vision, but close enough to avoid any major issues with continuity.  Yes, Klingons now had forehead ridges, but the best explanation for that was contained in the Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations (as Worf explained, Klingons did not discuss the change with outsiders). 

The Third Age began with the movie franchise reboot, where Chris Pine reinterpreted the role of Kirk.  One of the clever things done to avoid the whole consistency “tar baby” was to make everything due to a temporal anomaly, so that the events that followed would NOT be consistent with the events of the original TV series.  This was taken to a somewhat tedious extreme by Star Trek Into Darkness, which (spoilers!) was essentially a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan but with events slightly altered due to changes in the timeline.

So now there are two, maybe three, groups of fans: those loyal to the original Star Trek series and its characters (these people are pretty old at this point); those raised on The Next Generation and the subsequent TV series which tried hard to toe the corporate line; and those who came aboard with the recent movie reboot who see no reason to drag a 50 year old TV series into imposing limits on a new science fiction TV franchise.  Thus the split in opinion over how dedicated any new incarnation of Star Trek has to be to the details of what has come before.

I’ve written before that my theory for the decline in quality in the Star Trek franchise, starting with Voyager and the later seasons of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, was that they started hiring writers based on their knowledge of Star Trek trivia over having actual writing talent.  The first year of the original series featured scripts by noted science fiction authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Frederic Brown and DC Fontana, mainly because in the mid-1960’s there were few science fiction writers working in television.  More recent writers developed episodes with major plot points based on nuances that were probably not-thought-out details about Klingon physiology or Ferengi psychology; namely, they were Star Trek insiders and not graduates of screenwriting classes.

So, we’ll have to agree to disagree.  I will continue to think that Star Trek Discovery is a major misfire, while I watch City on the Edge of Forever and Our Man Bashir on Netflix.  Trek fans younger than me will eat up Discovery and believe that Star Trek Beyond is the best Star Trek movie yet.  If the Federation and the Klingons can co-exist, I suppose the various schools of Trek fandom can learn to live together.

The GOP Tax Plan

In case you haven’t heard, Republicans want to pass a “tax reform” measure.  Of course, being Republicans, when they say, “tax reform” they mean “tax cuts” primarily for the rich (because cutting taxes for the poor doesn’t accomplish very much).  Since this would dramatically increase the federal deficit, and because a lot of Republicans don’t like that idea, they have to look for ways to raise tax revenues without increasing tax rates, which can be tricky.

 One idea that was reported by respectable news sources is a plan to cap employee contributions to 401(k) plans, which are used by employees to save money for retirement.  The current cap limits tax deductible contributions from $18,000 to $24,000 a year; Republicans want to lower that amount to an amount possibly as low as $2,400 per year.

 Before I discuss the implications of this proposal, a little history of 401(k) plans is in order.  When 401(k)s were created in the 1970’s, they were a way to give highly paid executives a higher retirement income without raising benefits for everyone in a company’s pension plan.  Contributions to a 401(k) were treated as non-taxable income; taxes were paid when the money was withdrawn during retirement, at which point most company executives would be in a lower tax bracket, thus creating an incentive for the executive to squirrel away money.

 However, the tax code has changed a lot since the 1970’s.  Upper brackets were eliminated by the Reagan tax reforms, and companies found ways to compensate executives with stock options and the like which reduced the incentive for highly paid executives to use 401(k)s.  As private pension plans were eliminated during the late 20^th century (for reasons that I will leave to be explained another day), most private companies made 401(k)s the principal method of retirement saving for rank and file employees.

 One consequence of this is that the tax-deferred advantage of investing in a 401(k) has largely gone away.  It used to be said that retirees could live on 70% of their final income, mainly because presumably their house was paid off, but now many people refinance their housing instead of paying it off.  Also, medical expenditures are increasing for people of retirement age, so now people are expected to need about 90% of their final income in retirement.  This means that people who retire are in the same tax bracket as when they were working.

 So, the tax-deferral aspect of 401(k)s is just that—deferral, not avoidance.  What that means is that the Republican plan to cap 401(k) contributions won’t raise more tax revenue; it merely shifts when the taxes are paid from the future to the present.  So, the Republican plan mortgages the future in order to write down the deficit-enhancing aspects of the tax cuts.

 Shifting the tax payments means that the economy will be stimulated now, creating more jobs and, as I said, reducing the deficit now.  But there is no free lunch—the economy will be depressed in 10, 20, 30, or 40 years in the future when retirees retire and find they don’t have enough income to live on.  So not only will tax revenues be lower in the future, but there will be an increase in demand for government services as an increasing number of older citizen find they need government assistance to make ends meet.

 Taking public sector employees off pensions and putting them into 401(k) plans has been a Republican mantra for decades.  Now Republicans essentially want to take 401(k)s away (a cap of $2,400 per year would not allow people to save enough to live on when an employee reaches retirement age).  This means that the Republican plan would essentially mean that most workers couldn’t afford to retire, they would have to keep working until they die.  This may not be an issue for people in white collar jobs (California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is 84, announced she is running for re-election, meaning she plans on working until she is 90), but people in blue-collar trades often can’t physically continue to work when they get older and can’t meet the physical demands of their job.

The concept of “retirement” is a relatively new one; before the Great Depression (the one in the 1930’s, not the one in the 2010’s) pretty much everyone expected to work until they keeled over at their work station.  Thanks to the 20^th century development of pensions, enough could be set aside for future costs so that people might enjoy a few years of rest between work and the grave.  Then businesses decided that pensions were too expensive, so switched to 401(k)s, and now Republicans think that 401(k)s defer too much spending. 

 In a perfect world, everyone would save enough for their golden years.  In case you haven’t noticed, the world is less than perfect.  According to the Federal Reserve, Americans have a credit card debt of a little over $5,000 per person with a credit card, or $9,600 per household with credit card debt.  In our consumer culture, saving for the future is not as exciting as buying a really neat boat (or renting a one-bedroom home in the San Francisco Bay Area).  401(k)s are one of the few resources that people have to make wise decisions about savings, but the Republicans want to take away people’s futures in order to give the wealthy a tax cut.