PLATO'S TREE IS MISSING

It probably begs the question, but we'll ask it anyway.

 Why do politicians of whatever political philosophy never seem to understand what Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name,The Tipping Point, clearly noted: There
is a limit, as in people will alter their behavior?

The following is from a recent story in The New York Times about what's going on in Greece since the debt crisis began there where salaries and pensions have been cut, unemployment soared to nearly 27% and people are doing what people do when their pain threshold gets crossed or tipped, retrenching.

In raising the taxes, government officials hoped not just to increase revenue but also to equalize taxes on heating oil and diesel, to cut down on the illegal practice of selling cheaper heating oil as diesel fuel. But the effort, which many Greeks dismiss as a cruel stupidity, appears to have backfired in more than one way.

For one thing, the government seems to be losing money on the measure. Many Greeks......are simply not buying any heating oil this year. Sales in the last quarter of 2012 plunged 70 percent from a year earlier, according to official figures.

So while the government has collected more than $63 million in new tax revenue, it appears to have lost far more — about $190 million, according to an association of Greek oil suppliers — in revenue from sales taxes on the oil.

Grade school math says that's more than three times what the government took in and they most likely pissed a bunch of Greeks off in the process. This is a story about heating oil, in case you didn't catch it, poor, middle class and no-so middle class people trying to heat their homes and stay warm in the winter.

Meanwhile, many Greeks are suffering from the cold. In one recent survey......nearly 80 percent of respondents in northern Greece said they could not afford to heat their homes properly.

The return to wood burning is also taking a toll on the environment. Illegal logging in national parks is on the rise, and there are reports of late-night thefts of trees and limbs from city parks in Athens, including the disappearance of the olive tree planted where Plato is said to have gone to study in the shade.

At the same time, the smoke from the burning of wood — and often just about anything else that will catch fire — has caused spikes in air pollution that worry health officials. On some nights, the smog is clearly visible above Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, and in Athens, where particulate matter has been measured at three times the normal.

All this in what officials describe as not an unusually cold winter and, according to one official, so far there are no signs that the tax has discouraged illicit sales of heating oil.

Government officials, however, according to the story, say it's "too early to judge the new tax. The winter is not yet over." And Harry Theroharis, the Secretary General of the Ministry of Finance, called the situation a complex environment too complicated to blame the result solely on the new tax.

Meanwhile, though it's just hearsay. One recent cold night in Athens two elderly gentlemen involved in a heated discussion were spotted rubbing their hands together over a crackling bonfire. A passerby reportedly overheard one telling the other: "Aw, hell, it was an old tree anyway."