Recent budgets have been so generous to me that, like other relatively high earners who were lucky enough to buy their houses before the price boom, I have saved some money. I was thinking of shifting it into a special savings account. Now Charlie McCreevy, who drove up inflation by giving me money, wants to control it by giving me more. He is going to pay me £50 a month for saving £200. That's £600 this year for saving £2,400. If as a couple we managed to save twice that much, we would earn an extra £1,200 this year. We could fly to Lanzarote for a week for that. If we were so inclined, we could borrow against this extra income, put the money into shares and make more money. Or we could buy some property, a better bet now Charlie has abandoned his plans for an anti-speculation property tax. Why shouldn't we have a second home? Why not reward us for prudently acquiring a house in the 1980s? If we happen to drive a younger couple out of the property market, so be it. That's how markets distribute resources - efficiently. This is a great country if you have money. Does that £600-a-year merit award for saving or investing remind you of anything? Remember what pensioners got in the Budget, when middleclass households were getting thousands in tax relief? Old-age pensioners got £520 a year. The sick and disabled got £416 a year.

This juxtaposition is such an appalling statement of our collective priorities that comment is almost redundant. I don't need an extra £50 a month. Anyone who can afford to save or invest £200 a month, by definition does not need an extra £50 a month. I was planning to save anyway - I didn't need this encouragement.

What truly baffles me is how members of this Government can preside over these kind of redistributive policies and simultaneously claim to be defenders of social justice. "The left-wing focus on social justice as redistribution of resources by the State misses a wider concept of justice," the Tanaiste, Mary Harney, wrote in The Irish Times last week. The Progressive Democrats, she continued, "stand for equality of opportunity and merit". By increasing employment "our economic policies are working for justice".

Dermot Ahern, Minister for Social Affairs, took a similar stance in an article last summer.

"We do not believe a fair distribution of resources can be achieved by mechanistic distribution through the social welfare system. It can only be achieved by creating real equality of opportunity."

However, the Government was committed, he said, to address inequality which was neither acceptable nor desirable.

How do you start to respond to this? How can Mary Harney and Dermot Ahern reconcile their largesse to me and their niggardliness to the old and sick? How can they consider this compatible with a commitment to justice or equality? They know that as we grow wealthier, the gap between rich and poor - relative poverty and the exclusion it breeds - is growing. How can they justify yet more redistribution to the rich through the taxation system?

But then if you receive money though the taxation system, this is magically not redistribution. This becomes "returning taxpayers' money to them", as Mary Harney described the savings scheme.

Giving money to people though the social welfare system is different, "mechanistic redistribution" whatever that means. Have old-age pensioners a lesser claim on "taxpayers' money"? Many of them were taxpayers up to recently. If they were not, they were probably women who were prevented from working by the marriage bar and who are now on the lowest non-contributory pension (£95.50 a week, under £5,000 a year). Mary Harney and Dermot Ahern apparently believe that households on social welfare should be offered equality of opportunity.

"We have had to have a widening of income distribution to ensure it pays to work, to reward people for their skills, to ensure there is an incentive to take chances," Dermot Ahern wrote. (I am hardly taking chances by putting my money in a savings account.)

Older people take a chance, a one-in-two chance of poverty. Over half of households headed by an over-65 year-old live on under 60 per cent of average income. For them incentives to take chances are hardly relevant. Social democrats argue that even when people have no power in the marketplace they should have sufficient income to participate fully in society.

How is it that middle class people like me, whose high earnings were built on heavily state-subsidised education, are "taxpayers" who deserve "our money" returned? Why do we have prior claim to people who left school early, lost a job, became ill or old, who really need social support? The poor are the families of the sick, the low paid and single people (like widows, the separated, carers, single parents). Only a quarter of the poorest households are headed by an unemployed person. And people who are unemployed today are likely to have multiple problems and to find when they do get a job that they remain in poverty.

On RTE's Later with O'Leary programme two weeks ago, Charlie McCreevy acknowledged this is a centre-right government and stated: "Governments can't bring everybody up to the same level, it just happens".

I don't know what level we are aiming for, Charlie, but thanks to you I am getting there faster than many people. If only pensioners would save.