On 22/11/2017 16:35, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

JNugent wrote:

That certainly is often erroneously supposed to be the case. National
"Insurance" is not an insurance scheme - and you know it isn't. If it
were, it would cost more the greater the risk of unemployment or
sickness because that's the way that insurance works.

That may be the way profit making insurance works. But not a terribly good
idea for social insurance. Perhaps you'd be delighted to pay more for the
health side if your family had a history of some sorts of conditions?

"Social insurance" is simply mis-named.

One has to admit that as a title, it *sounds* good (andcertainly better
than "extra income tax", which is all it is*), but it isn't insurance,
which works on the actuarial principle (calculating the odds).

Renamimg "National Insurance" as the extra income tax it is would be the
honest way to proceed.

[* I can remember when NI was a flat tax charged at so much a week
irrespective of earnings and could not be regarded as an income tax, but
for the last forty-plus years, an income tax is what it has been, as was
evidenced by the fact that in the mid-1970s, responsibility for
collecting it passed from the DHSS (as was) to the Inland Revenue (as was).]