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GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@ redbluffdailynews.com Fax: 530-527-9251 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS By Jason Stanford "TheHungerGames"was supposed to be fiction, but maybe it was prophetic. Now comes "The Briefcase," CBS's new reality show that pits des- perate middle-class families against each other for finan- cial survival. This seems more appropriate for dystopian sci- ence fiction than contemporary prime time, and the instinct is to kill the messenger: How dare CBS air this garbage? My problem with this and other so-called "poverty porn" shows isn't that television net- works are exploiting economic desperation for entertainment. My problem is that it no lon- ger seems strange that middle- class families are a couple of bad breaks from poverty. Be- ing broke is no longer just for the poor. Unless you're one of the lucky few on the good side of the wealth divide, you could be in the middle class and just barely getting by, hoping to make it month to month. "The Briefcase" is like "So- phie's Choice" for the finan- cially strapped. Every week, two families experiencing tough times are each handed a briefcase full of $101,000— with one horrible condition. They have to decide how much to keep and how much to share with the other family. Each family learns about the other's hardships, so we witness a wrenching deci- sion: However much each fam- ily keeps for its own survival is therefore denied to a fam- ily all-too-similar to theirs. All the while, the audience— Americans just like them—sits in voyeuristic judgment. Poverty porn is not lim- ited to our country or our age. Over in Great Britain, where the accents can fool you into thinking that they are made of better stuff, the BBC has a new reality show called "Brit- ain's Hardest Grifter." Over five weeks, 25 unemployed and low-wage workers will com- pete by doing various jobs. The "least effective work- ers" will be eliminated after each episode, and the winners get £15,000, which is around $23,000. The drama of watching poor people slug it out for cash prizes might be new to televi- sion but it's been around for years. During the Great De- pression, people also enjoyed watching their fellow strug- gling citizens entertain them by competing in dance mar- athons, six-day bicycle races and flagpole sitting contests. The contestants won by endur- ing misery, but then didn't ev- eryone back then? This was also about the time that escapist stories en- joyed a heyday, notably "Little Orphan Annie," a comic strip that spawned a radio show and two film adaptations dur- ing the 1930s. And really, what is "The Briefcase" but a com- bination of the humiliation of publicly enduring pain for the promise of being rescued from financial ruin? If modern-day poverty porn is just the reinvention of a dark period in American his- tory, what's different here is that the middle-class no lon- ger represents safe harbor from the storm. It used to be that the American Dream was to buy a home, put your kids through college, and retire comfortably. Nowadays, good luck with that. It's more than a feeling of in- security. The American mid- dle class has not gotten a raise since the late 1990s, and the average family's net worth is lower (adjusted for infla- tion) than it was in 1989. We're closer to the edge than our par- ents were at this age, and it's stressful. If this rings true to you, you're not alone. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that the middle class is better defined by stress and anxiety than stability and a solid income. This rings true to me. I barely kept my business open during the Great Recession, but I ended up having to sell the house because the mort- gage payments were too much. Things are better now, and debts are getting paid off, but I haven't taken a deep breath since 2009. Maybe you know the feeling. As easy as it is to sit in judg- ment of "The Briefcase," it's harder for me to sit at a re- move and watch it happen to other people, because the problems the contestants face aren't so different from mine that they can't be solved by a pile of money. The con- ceit is disgusting and exploit- ative, but I can't help wonder- ing how many people like me would go on the show. Would you? JasonStanfordisaregular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Security Project partner. You can email him at stanford@oppresearch. com and follow him on Twitter @JasStanford. Commentary Wouldyou go on 'The Briefcase?' Cartoonist's take Some of my habits might strike you as odd; they are, however, useful for my pur- poses. For in- stance, I actually look at my PG&E bills, apply a cal- culator to the fig- ures and track the changes in what my electricity ac- tually costs on a per kilowatt/hour (kwh) basis; I also figure how much I would pay if the base- line and rates from years ago were applied to today's usage. You needn't be a math profes- sor or savant to perform such calculations; it is not, however, easily done. You may glance at your baseline number of kwhs that are charged at the lowest rate; you might not have noticed the changes, announced or not, over the years. It works like this: Number of days in billing pe- riod x allowed kwhs x the base- line rate; a higher rate applies to the next number of kwhs up to 130 percent of the baseline; a higher rate then applies to those that fall between 130 and 200 percent, and the highest rate for those over 200 percent. When they reduce the daily allowance for your baseline, they are moving more of your hours out of the cheapest rate; those same hours are now charged a higher or highest rate. Simultaneously, the cost per kwh is nudged up over time for each tier. If you're still reading, here's the punch line to the sick joke that is what we pay for electric- ity from PG&E: I paid 30 per- cent more for the same elec- tricity as I did 2 years ago, which means double-digit in- creases each of the last 2 years at a time when inflation has been in low single digits. My current cost was about $190; 2 years ago that same electric- ity would have cost about $145. Put another way: I then paid about 13.5 cents per kwh; I just paid about 17.5 cents per kwh, also a 30 percent increase over 2 years. Another fun habit I have is to set articles aside for column- writing material. For instance, last November 15 a Daily News story titled, "US giving $3 bil- lion to help poor nations with climate change," made for a chuckle when I read, on Janu- ary 28, "US green-energy blue- print, meant to help Liberia, fails." A November 18 Daily News piece, "Huge solar plant lags in early production," described the epic failure of the world's larg- est solar array, the Ivanpah So- lar Electric Generating System in an ideal solar power location, the Southern California desert. "Epic failure" might overstate the case but the $2.2 billion project, with 350,000 computer- controlled mirrors designed to turn water into steam to run turbines, was supposed to gen- erate electricity for 140,000 homes. "So far, however, the plant is producing about half of its ex- pected annual output for 2014… Factors such as clouds, jet con- trails and weather have had a greater impact on the plant than the owners anticipated… It could take until 2018 for the plant, backed by $1.6 billion in federal loan guarantees to hit its annual peak target" (Califor- nia Energy Commission). That amounts to almost $16,000 per each of 140,000 homes; over $31,000 for each home at half its reduced output. That price tag is, of course, spread over the life of the project, which will certainly require additional maintenance expenses. It may be inconvenient to point out the obvious: It will generate no power at night, so those 140,000 or 70,000 homes will not in fact be powered as they would by a gas, nuclear or, "Gaia" forbid, a coal plant. All solar energy dies at night, so unless people revert to the pre- electric era, limiting their ac- tivities to when the sun is up, they will still need backup elec- tricity from the aforementioned sources. In addition to the 25-50 cent cost per kwh for solar (com- pared to 5 cents for coal power), I've read that solar and wind power plants only generate one- half of their rated capacity. Our electric bill in Bend, Oregon, is a simple calculation of 7 cents x kilowatt/hours used. Cheap! Last June 3, 2014, an AP writer shared the happy news from on high, "Obama: Plant rule will shrink power prices." Obama simply asserted that his policies to fight climate change by increasing the re- quirements for renewable en- ergy "would both shrink elec- tricity prices and protect the health of vulnerable Americans. He scolded critics…" Perhaps he refers to critics who took him at his word that under his pol- icies "energy prices would nec- essarily skyrocket." Of course, it is self-evident that reducing carbon dioxide will have zero positive affects on Americans' health considering we all ex- hale the gas with each breath. I guess PG&E didn't get the message to "shrink electricity prices" as just 2 months later the Oakland Tribune told us "PG&E to raise residential rates 5.8 percent." As I proved above, prices went up 30 percent in the last 2 years. Perhaps you can get the big picture: Emperor Obama de- crees, without any legislative support, what he wants the states to do…or else, I guess. The "EPA promotes global warming proposal to gover- nors," (AP 6/11,2014); then gov- ernors like Jerry Brown and Sacramento Democrats hop to and mandate more (and more expensive) renewable energy; then locals like our Board of Supervisors swing into action, "Greenhouse gas emission goals set—Reductions of 10 percent by 2028 targeted for county" (Rich Greene, July 24, 2014). Rasmussen polling found that "2/3 of Americans are un- willing to pay even $100/year of additional costs to pre- vent global warming." Califor- nians are paying many times that in a futile attempt to re- duce the Earth's temperature. The Lieberman-Warner cap- and-trade bill, defeated in the U.S. Senate, would have cost each household up to $6,752 per year and reduced GDP by $669 billion annually. WeS— personally, collectively, eco- nomically—can't afford alarm- ist policies. Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@ yahoo.com. The way I see it Costly bills for climate measures The American middle class has not gotten a raise since the late 1990s, and the average family's net worth is lower (adjusted for inflation) than it was in 1989. We're closer to the edge than our parents were at this age, and it's stressful. Sounding off A look at what readers are saying in comments on our website and on social media. Congratulations to the Class Of 2015:) We are very proud of you all. Carolyn Whitlock Regnell: On the Corning Union High School commencement. Oh boy, go team go, it's my favorite sport to watch, Little League games into the World Little League Series. Red Bluff went there in 1973(?) before, we can do it again. Sharon Wilkes: On the Red Bluff Little League Major Cubs capturing the league title. Don Polson StateandNational Assemblyman James Galla- gher, 150 Amber Grove Drive, Ste. 154, Chico 95973, 530 895-4217, http://ad03.asmrc. org/ Senator Jim Nielsen, 2634 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 879-7424, senator. nielsen@senate.ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown, State Capital Building, Sac- ramento 95814, 916 445-2841, fax 916 558-3160, governor@ governor.ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa, 507 Cannon House Office Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202 225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Fein- stein, One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Francisco 94104, 415 393- 0707, fax 415 393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, 1700 Montgomery St., San Francisco 94111, 510 286-8537, fax 202 224-0454 YOUR OFFICIALS OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, June 9, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6