Staggeringly ill-informed comments about National Insurance...

... over at The Daily Mail:

In among the dross, the currently best rated comment plus reply:

macular degenerate, limassol, Cyprus:

THE ONLY CHANGE THE GOVERNMENT NEED TO MAKE WITH NATIONAL INSURANCE IS THE WAY IT IS UTILISED.

MarkM, London, 1 hour ago

Well said! So, let me get this straight: NI was supposed to be for pensions, the NHS and other welfare but successive governments have stolen it for their own ends (i.e. re-election campaign bait).

Now, instead of stopping the shameless theft of the much-needed funds as the baby-boomer generation starts to need it, their proposed resolution is to 'rename it'? The concept of the NHS gets a lot of undeserved flack when it has been the plundering of that financial war chest that needs to be addressed and the criminals, like Osborne, locked up.

In popular imagination, National Insurance "pays for" contributory benefits, the old age pension and the NHS. Heck knows what made people pick these three things out of the hat, but there you go.

Those two comments suggest that spending on those three areas is much less than the amount collected in National Insurance, don't they?

Truth is, just over £100 bn a year is collected in National Insurance; about £5 bn goes on contributory benefits; about £90 bn is spent on old age pensions; and about £120 bn goes on the NHS.

Oh, hang about... the government spends more on those things than is collected in National Insurance. If you want to call this "re-election campaign bait", then fair enough, but it's the other big taxes (income tax and VAT) which are paying for half of it.

Twats.