And then they'd stop after people learned to go to checkout to see if they'd "won", and if not stop or get a refund, clear their cookies, etc... and try again.

What country are you talking about? The U.S. has been going steadily away from laissez faire capitalism for at least 100 years now... to the point where it might actually start turning back in the other direction as more and more centrally-planned fiascoes are revealed and the old socialist hippies start dying off.

Your other disconnect seems to be thinking that "corporation as top tier person" is laissez faire, as opposed to a government rent-seeking benefit largely found in countries with more government control of the economy. Pro-economic freedom doesn't necessarily mean pro-government organized corporation.

that left tens of millions without health insurance

At this rate, it's highly likely that there will be more uninsured in the U.S. over the next few years than over the last few years. That's what happens when you make a product significantly more expensive and more difficult to sell and to purchase.

If you think things are bad now, wait until next year when the business mandate that Obama unilaterally delayed kicks in. That's going to be even worse for the people who already had insurance....

The real question is why the Democrats needed to take over the entire health insurance industry if the goal was to just help pay for insurance for a few million folks that didn't have it and wanted it. You could have covered that with a check just out of what's been spent on the federal and state ACA exchanges.

The reality is that this has always been about the Dems making a federal power grab over health insurance and the health industry. That was never going to do anything but make the already massive government-induced problems in the insurance and health industries worse.

You may want to also factor in that insurance in NY is much more expensive than in many other parts of the country. The OP didn't specify a location, so it's difficult to tell, but I've had plans on the individual market before that were $350/month for a family of 6 in one state (after paying $1300/month in a high cost state), so $165/month for an younger individual doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Now, of course, the whole country is being forced into NY/NJ/MA-style expensive plans, so that all goes way up...

Did you read the page I linked to?
"... the increase in dishwasher efficiency has, in the past, resulted in longer cycle times, as machines are forced to stretch less heated water over longer periods to get dishes clean. Following the last Energy Star specification update in August 2009, a few of the models we tested required three hours per load."

It's a simple trade-off for heating efficiency... if you heat less, but wait longer for the heat to be absorbed over time, you'll be more energy efficient, but take longer to finish.

It's not a big mystery...think of driving your car. If you accelerate quickly and drive faster, you'll get places faster, but use more fuel. If you want to be more "efficient" in your fuel use, one way is to end up getting places slower and being less time efficient. That's the simplest way for manufacturer's to meet energy star standards without any fundamental changes in how their product works.

Of course, those estimates are wildly inaccurate, to the point of being worse than no estimates at all....

Notice that following the estimate process, you get told about possible subsidies repeatedly, but that never once do they ask for your age? Wait, isn't that one of the most important things to determine what your premium will be??? Ooops.... it's almost like they're just quoting based on an assumption that you're 27 years old or something like that...

I know this is /., but some of us have a family with kids, etc... and not only need to do more than one load of dishes a day, but occasionally want to re-use dishes for preparing the next meal...

By "inferior", I was specifically thinking of cleaning products, pesticide products and such that substitute chemicals that work well with chemicals they consider "greener" that don't work as well.

Yeah, I wasn't saying that as if it was a good thing...

It's not just you. I actively avoid such products. I assume that they're either lying, or using inferior materials or processes, or charging more for what they use in order to make the claim, otherwise their competitors would be using the same materials and/or processes.

Another thing to avoid is energy star appliances. They take dish washers and clothes dryers, for example, and get them a better rating by taking much longer to clean or dry things. The end result is a product that doesn't work as well. For example, 2-3 hour dishwasher cycles are becoming the norm.

Here's a useful chart covering spending and revenue with who controlled what. People like to talk about Presidential "spending", but the reality is that Congress can spend anything they want without the President (supermajority), but the President can't spend a dime without Congress.

Reagan asked for less spending than Congress ever gave him. Clinton asked for more spending than Congress ever gave him.

Please name the last year in which Democrats controlled Congress (The folks who make the ultimate funding decisions) and managed to balance the budget and reduce the deficit?

Oops, has never happened, has it? Only time we've even come close in recent memory was when the Republicans "shut the government down" in opposition to Clinton and they negotiated a somewhat reasonable budget. Hint: Clinton's suggested budgets were much higher than what got passed by Congress.

Revenue is about the same per capita over an extended period of time. It will go up and down with economic conditions, and economic conditions are still a bit down lately, so revenue will be as well until that has turned around. Studies have been done showing that despite historical tax rate changes, revenue generally stays in a similar range. You can cut taxes and increase growth a little, or you can raise certain taxes and divert resources to avoidance and paperwork, but it's really not that big of an impact. You have to have economic activity in order to tax it, unless we're going to switch to a model of confiscating based on saved wealth directly.

Government spending, on the other hand, has significantly increased. You can blame the war/terrorism funding, or the bailouts, or the wasteful spending to cronies of those in power, or increase entitlements for an aging population, but you can't deny that it's increased significantly, no matter how you want to measure it.

So the only really serious conversation to have about fixing debt/deficit issues is what you want to cut in terms of spending. If we could get the right-wing to agree to cut defense/anti-terrorism spending and the left-wing to cut environmental/wealth transfer boondoggles, and/or slightly increase the age for retirement for SS/Medicare, or cut the useless ACA, or whatever, even if overall only by 5-10% around current spending levels year-over-year it could be solved pretty quickly.

But there doesn't seem to be much interest in that sort of thing. People are more interested in trying to score political points.

So, what you're stating is that inflation adjusted dollars (in the chart I linked to) don't adjust for inflation? Hmmm... seems you may have misread something. As Magius confirms below, revenue and spending are both up, spending is up more. You can blame that on war spending or hookers and blow for Obama's special family friends, either way, still have to reign it in to fix the deficit/debt.

As for your other point, using % of GDP is basically useless. GDP varies based on the state of the economy, so the exact same level of spending from year to year will be a varying percentage of GDP. Also, government spending is counted as part of standard GDP. What kind of comparison is that for showing if it's increased or not? It's primary use is to try and disguise real money increases as not being as bad, because the economy has also grown.

Now if you wanted to use spending in constant dollars per capita, that might be somewhat useful, as you can argue at least some things cost more with more people (things like national defense don't really change much, but some others do). Even with that, you'd have to argue that at 10-12% population change since 2000 needed a 50%+ increase in spending. So that's a tough argument to make...