OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 2016 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager Water under the bridge Compiled by Bob Duke From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers 10 years ago this week — 2006 The fans waited at the rail above the West Mooring Basin rooting for their special number. The cannon loudly banged in the start of the race. But spectators hoping for their little duck to be the irst across the in- ish line at the Ducky Derby had to wait quite a while. The boat engine that was supposed to help push the bath-time pets from one pier to the next wasn’t working, nor was a spare motorboat that tried to ill in. Eventually, the tight clump of about 100 ducks drifted to the waiting ambassadors and Regatta queen, who had the dificult task of determining a winner in a neck-and-100-other-necks inish. Duck 191, which had the support of Marcy Phillips of Astoria, took top prize at the event. Most of the people who testiied at the Cannon Beach City Council meeting Tuesday do not support paving 29 percent of one former sewer lagoon to provide more parking. Instead, they want it entirely restored as a wetland. “Where are the working families going to live?” That’s a question that preys on the mind of Kathy Lucas, executive director of the Clatsop County Housing Authority, as Astoria property values continue to rise. “Rents are escalating, wages are service-industry type. One can’t sup- port the other,” she says. “Working families already living in our neigh- borhoods are being squeezed out.” 50 years ago — 1966 An Alaska irm has bought two of the three state-owned ferries left idle by the opening of the Asto- ria Bridge. But the “queen” of the Oregon leet – the M.R. Chessman – still belongs to the state. The state surplus property division Friday sold the Tour- ist No. II and Tourist No. III to Alaska Marine Developers, Inc., a irm headed by Robert E. Speidel, of Spenard, Alaska. Speidel paid $34,000 for the old Tourist II, and $48,000 for the Tourist III. Average daily trafic in toll-paying vehicles for the irst 14 days of oper- ation of the Astoria Bridge was 2,701, according to data provided today by Oregon Highway Department. The Daily Astorian The opening of the Astoria Bridge in 1966 ended the era of ferry travel between Astoria and Megler, Wash- ington. One of the inest tuna ishing seasons in several years is still under way off the Oregon Coast, and catches are coming in steadily, although not quite as big per boat. The reorganized boys’ drum and bugle corps, the Sunsetters, will make its irst appearance Sunday at 11 a.m. at the American Legion Pic- nic at Crabapple Lake in Fort Stevens State Park, as a rousing welcome to the visitors from Walldorf, Germany, who will be guests of the Legion at a barbecued picnic lunch. Business has been better in Astoria this year. The down- town district has been bustling. Trafic has been thicker on our streets this summer than ever before in the memories of oldest inhabitants. An accompaniment to this thriving activity has been an acute increase in the problem of inding satisfactory parking downtown for shoppers and others doing business in the city’s core area. 75 years ago — 1941 Clatsop County labor is now being employed extra hours at overtime pay to the greatest extent since overtime pay became general. So rushed is the Youngs Bay Lumber company mill to complete illing a 3,500,000-foot order of lumber for the new motorship Oregon that its lumberjacks are working 10 hours a day, seven days a week. The freighter is at Warrenton, waiting for the balance of its order to be cut. Before the present national emergency a ship seldom if ever called unless her cargo was on the dock. Between 300 and 400 cars an hour moved over the new- ly-opened Neahkahnie section of the Oregon Coast highway Sunday, the State Highway Department said today. The road, linking Nehalem and Cannon Beach junctions, is said to be one of the most scenic along the 400 miles of Oregon coastline. From the shore of the Paciic to inland prairies, sport ishermen by the hundreds will cast their lines for the biggest royal Chinook in the Colum- bia River from Aug. 26 to Sept. 1, the seven days of the 1941 Astoria Regatta salmon derby. The city of Astoria has warned H.E. Stemler of Portland and the Tidepoint company of Astoria that they will be held responsible for “disturbance” of natural and existing condi- tion” likely to cause slides on Taylor Avenue between Monterey and Florence. Sailboat races at this year’s Regatta are likely to be the best and the biggest in scope of any modern Regatta, judging by arrangements completed by the marine events committee of the Regatta commission, headed by Joseph Dyer of Astoria, and by the Columbia River Yacht- ing Association. To each his own Olympics By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Washington Post Writers Group W ASHINGTON — You may be thrilled by the feats of Katie Ledecky, mes- merized by the grace of the women gymnasts, startled by Rio spectators mocking U.S. soccer star Hope Solo with chants of “Zika! Zika!” (the irst recorded instance, noted one wit, of a stadium rocking to the invocation of a virus). Allow me, however, to interrupt the pre- packaged, heart-tug- ging, tape-delayed Olympic coverage to bring you the real sporting news of the year. It has just been announced that on Nov. 11 in New York City the World Chess Championship will begin. You scoff, of course. For years, I’ve had to put up with amused puzzlement at my taste in entertainment. (Old joke: How do you do the wave at a chess match? With your eyebrows.) But I remain undaunted. True, chess is not an Olympic sport. But it should be. In 1984, when challenger Garry Kasparov forced that championship match into 17 draws in a row — each about ive hours of unbearable, unrelenting concentration — world champion Anatoly Karpov was so physically and mentally drained (he lost 22 pounds) that the Kremlin pressured the World Chess Federation to stop the match, thereby saving Soviet-favorite Karpov from forfeiting the title to the brash, free- thinking, half-Jewish Kasparov. My irst tournament — the 2002 Atlantic Open, a weekend of all-day pressure so intense that I left in a near- catatonic Karpovian state — was also my last. I have stuck to casual ive-minute “blitz” chess ever since. My winnings — a $150 check that remains framed and forever uncashed — hang as a reminder never to do that again. And while chess’ governing body cannot match the International Olympic Committee for corruption, the World Chess Federation more than makes up for that in weirdness. Its president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, former president of Russia’s republic of Kalmykia, is not only a reliable Moscow toady (sanctioned by the Treasury Department in November 2015), but a nutcase who insists he’s been abducted by aliens. They wore yellow suits. So why am I so excited about the upcoming match in New York? Who goes to a chess game anyway? I do. Twice, in fact, in the early 1990s when the championship was also played in New York (the 1995 match on the observation deck of the World Trade Center). I drove from Washington both times with a couple of friends, to the consternation of the rest of our acquaintances, who thought we were certiiable. They didn’t understand that we don’t actually sit and watch the game. Instead, we go to the grandmaster room where the greatest chess minds in the world crowd around a few drop-down demonstration boards, trading furious in-game commentary on the boneheadedness of the latest move and the cosmic brilliance of their own proposed nine-move counterattack. My friends and I were barely hanging on trying to follow the dazzling riffs lung about by the immortals around us. Not to denigrate the elegance of the balance beam or the beauty of the pole vault, but that experience was (as we used to say when the world was young) mind-blowing. Twenty-one years is a long time to wait to have your mind blown again. But there’s a more mundane reason for making the trip this time: a compelling storyline with a touch of the Cold War tension that made the 1972 Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky match such an international sensation. The reigning world champion is Magnus Carlsen, a 25-year-old Norwegian who, unlike Fischer, is quite normal. He sports a winning personality and such good looks that he does commercials for a European clothing line. His challenger is the classic Russian heavy, Sergey Karjakin, who (reports The New York Times) is a fan of both Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Crimea and who knocked off two brilliant Americans to get to the title ight. Not exactly U.S.-USSR 1972. But Norway-Russia 2016 does have its charms, given Putin’s threats and intrusions into the Baltics and Scandinavia. Go Oslo! I do concede that since Fischer- Spassky, chess has lost much of its mystique. The fall can be dated to May 11, 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov, widely considered the greatest human ever to play the game. Today we don’t even bother with the man-machine contest. No human can beat the best software. The ultimate world series is between computer programs. And machines don’t sweat. Or strive, suffer or exult. Humans do. So I’ll join the fun and cheer the Olympians. It’ll help pass the time until the main event Nov. 11. Wisdom, courage and the economy By PAUL KRUGMAN New York Times News Service I t’s fantasy football time in political punditry, as commentators try to dismiss Hillary Clinton’s dom- inance in the polls — yes, Clinton Derangement Syndrome is alive and well — by insisting that she would be losing badly if only the GOP had nominated someone else. We will, of course, never know. But one thing we do know is that none of Donald Trump’s actual rivals for the nomi- nation bore any resemblance to their imaginary candidate, a sensible, mod- erate conservative with good ideas. Let’s not forget, for example, what Marco Rubio was doing in the memorized sentence he famously couldn’t stop repeating: namely, insinuating that President Barack Obama is deliberately undermining America. It wasn’t all that different from Donald Trump’s claim that Obama founded ISIS. And let’s also not forget that Jeb Bush, the ultimate establishment candidate, began his campaign with the ludicrous assertion that his policies would double the American economy’s growth rate. Which brings me to my main subject: Clinton’s economic vision, which she summarized last week. It’s very much a center-left vision: incremental but fairly large increases in high-income tax rates, further tightening of inancial regulation, further strengthening of the social safety net. It’s also a vision notable for its lack of outlandish assumptions. Unlike just about everyone on the Republican side, she isn’t justifying her proposals with claims that they would cause a radical quickening of the U.S. economy. As the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center put it, she’s “a politician who would pay for what she promises.” So here’s my question: Is the modesty of the Clinton economic agenda too much of a good thing? Should accelerating U.S. economic growth be a bigger priority? For while the U.S. has done reasonably well at recovering from the 2007-09 inancial crisis, longer- term economic growth is looking very disappointing. Some of this is just demography, as baby boomers retire and growth in the working-age population slows down. But there has also been a somewhat mysterious decline in labor force participation among prime-age adults and a sharp drop in productivity growth. The result, according to the Congressional Budget Ofice, is that the growth rate of potential GDP — what the economy could produce at full employment — has declined from around 3.5 percent per year in the late 1990s to around 1.5 percent now. And some people I respect believe that trying to get that rate back up should be a big goal of policy. But as I was trying to think this through, I realized that I had Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer running through my head: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I know, it’s somewhat sacrilegious applied to economic policy, but still. After all, what do we actually know how to do when it comes to economic policy? We do, in fact, know how to provide essential health care to everyone; most advanced countries do it. We know how to provide basic security in retirement. We know quite a lot about how to raise the incomes of low-paid workers. I’d also argue that we know how to ight inancial crises and recessions, although political gridlock and deicit obsession has gotten in the way of using that knowledge. On the other hand, what do we know about accelerating long-run growth? According to the budget ofice, potential growth was pretty stable from 1970 to 2000, with nothing either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton did making much obvious difference. The subsequent slide began under George W. Bush and continued under Obama. This history suggests no easy way to change the trend. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try. I’d argue, in particular, for substantially more infrastructure spending than Clinton is proposing, and more borrowing to pay for it. This might signiicantly boost growth. But it would be unwise to count on it. Meanwhile, I don’t think enough people appreciate the courage involved in focusing on things we actually know how to do, as opposed to happy talk about wondrous growth. When conservatives promise fantastic growth if we give them another chance at Bushonomics, one main reason is that they don’t want to admit how much they would have to cut popular programs to pay for their tax cuts. When centrists urge us to look away from questions of distribution and fairness and focus on growth instead, all too often they’re basically running away from the real issues that divide us politically. So it’s actually quite brave to say: “Here are the things I want to do, and here is how I’ll pay for them. Sorry, some of you will have to pay higher taxes.” Wouldn’t it be great if that kind of policy honesty became the norm?