You can’t take it with you so why not share it?

My grandfather used to say ‘There are no pockets in a shroud’, writes Paul Mills.

Earlier this week Christine Lagarde, CEO of the International Monetary Fund, said that “the true heroes”, of the Irish austerity programme, “the ones who have really taken the brunt, are the people of Ireland and their representatives”.

It’s no surprise that many might see that comment as trite, patronising and condescending.

She is reported to have also said that “protection of the poor” had to be the cornerstone of any programme. We know l now that this government and its predecessor choose the opposite route.

The column lead with the headline “Troika did not consider bailout effects on the public”. Can we presume from that, that she meant that the troika did not realise that folk would get very upset when they saw that those who benefitted most from the boom suffered the least when things went pear-shaped and many ended up even wealthier than they had been before the recession?

It was not, unfortunately, a phenomenon to be experienced solely by Ireland. Despite a major world recession when production output tumbled, Oxfam reports that the richest 1% saw their net worth rise to 48% of the world’s wealth up from 44% in 2009, the second full year of the downturn.

Indeed the wealthiest 80 in the top 1% have a collective worth of $1.3tn which equates to the same amount shared by the poorest half of the world or 3.5bn people. It might just help to underpin the fact that some folk really do believe that he who dies the richest with the most toys wins. We won’t bore you with the rest of the statistics — suffice to say that they are mind-bogglingly unjustifiable. It would appear that the world is becoming even more unfair as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

US President Barack Obama has decided that he wants to balance up things a wee bit in his own patch, given the totally unfair and unbalanced state of the US economy. By taxing the “rich” he plans on taking in $320bn over the next 10 years which will more than pay for his proposed supports for the middle classes that have suffered so much during the recession.

According to Forbes, one third of the billionaires listed inherited some or all of their money. In other words they did little or nothing to earn it and apparently pay little in tax on inheriting the vast billions due to clever Trust Funds and other tax avoidance manoeuvring.

Such avoidance is not available in Ireland to those of us closer to the bottom of the heap. In Ireland we’ve seen a reduction in the tax free thresholds on bequests to around 50% of what they were a decade ago.

We are once again seeing property prices rise and with the increasing value of property very many risk being forced to dispose of the family home just to pay taxation.

Money is being taken out of the economy to artificially support an over-manned and over-paid bureaucracy. An economy that needs to be stimulated is being starved of funds on the one hand by the banks and on the other by government.

One can only wonder if the resources of the world were shared more equally how better a place it would be. As it is, the vast bulk of people around the world live in abject poverty, barely able to make a living and feed a family.

In Ireland we are relatively well off in comparison but if we had more we could spend more and help to oil the engine of the economy. If those billions of people who are now scratching for a living were able to up their wages they would also help to grow business and create new markets.

Surely we can find a way to share some of the vast resources sitting doing nothing with people who could not spend what they have even in a million years and then use those resources to try to make the world a fairer place.

After all, there are no pockets in a shroud or to put it another way; you cannot take it with you.

Paul Mills