National Insurance: are the Tories this useless?

OK, for those under a brick, headline news most of the last week has been the argument between the two Labservative parties over the planned National Insurance increase. It's dull and longwinded; palpably obviously, no one commenting on it in the media seems to actually understand it at all. Boy George Gideon Osborne doesn't.

I suspect Darling does, but is keeping schtum for political reasons, and I'm pretty sure Vince is doing the same. Why would they both do this? Y'see, unless my understanding of economics generally is completely off base (and I've been trying to do a lot of understanding of economics over the last 5 years), increasing National Insurance does cost jobs. Channel 4 FactCheck certainly think so. Here's why:

( It's all about Tax Incidence and Marginal Costs )

( It's not about the overall tax bill )

( Tax incidence: who pays )

Note that when Vince has attacked the Tories on this, he's not argued with them too much over the NI stuff; he's argued with them over how they're going to pay for it; he's right to say that the money they're using is pretty much fictional, from what I can tell.

The "a price worth paying" argument

What the Govt could, and perhaps should, be doing is actually admitting that there will be a small decrease in the rate of fall of unemployment (which is basically what the above means), but that the greater economic stability makes us all better off medium term, etc etc etc. Y'know, the "a price worth paying" argument. Except that doesn't tend to go down well with the Trades Unions, who, well, are bankrolling their election campaign.

And I'm not sure, myself, that it is a price worth paying, there are better ways of raising money; capital gains tax taper relief anyone?

Isn't politics fun?

Oh, wait, no, this is several billions pounds of national debt and about 100,000 jobs we're talking about here. Not really fun at all.