A lot has happened since President Obama introduced his last budget in February 2010. His party took an historic “shellacking” at the polls for its big government policies, his Fiscal Commission recommended serious spending cuts, and European governments have illustrated the severe problems of deficit spending.  

The George W. Bush administration ushered in a new era of big government. The Obama administration has built on Bush’s profligacy, and the president’s new fiscal 2012 budget proposal would further cement the trend.

Despite the record $1.6 trillion deficit this year, and the consensus that exploding spending and debt is pushing the nation toward catastrophe, the Obama administration has completely chickened out on spending reforms in its new budget.

In his customary salesman style, Vice President Joe Biden recently made a pitch to a Philadelphia crowd for a plan to spend $53 billion over the next six years on a national system of high-speed rail.

House Republicans proposed some (tiny) spending cuts this week and the Obama administration will likely propose some (tiny) cuts next week in the federal budget.

A report from the Government Accountability Office finds that the federal government administers 47 different employment and job training programs at a cost to taxpayers of about $18 billion. The GAO excluded another 51 programs that could be considered as providing job training assistance, such as student loan subsidies.

President Obama will release his budget blueprint for fiscal 2012 next week. If an op-ed penned by his budget director, Jacob Lew, in Sunday’s New York Times is any indication, the administration intends to continue fiddling while the government’s finances burn.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that the National Archives and Records Administration’s Electronic Records Archive project is headed for major cost overruns. Initiated in 2001, the project was originally projected to cost $745 million but could end up costing $1.4 billion. The project’s development phase was supposed to be completed by September, but the GAO estimates that it won’t be completed until 2017.

The other day, The Wall Street Journal provided a public service by lambasting Newt Gingrich for his absurd speech to the ethanol lobby in Des Moines last month (money line: “Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?’”). Today, Gingrich and fellow ethanol-maven James Woolsey struck back in those very same pages. In doing so, Gingrich provided yet more evidence that he’s intellectually unfit for office.

The Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program sets aside federal contracts for minority-owned or other “disadvantaged” small businesses. In his book on the “scandalous” history of the SBA, author Jonathan J. Bean sums of the program’s sordid legacy: