Budget agreement is imperfect, but a good first step

  Budgets are about choices. The budget agreement announced by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA) and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) makes plenty of choices—many of them good, others less so—but the sum total of their choices results in a package that moves the country in a positive direction. The Murray-Ryan deal would, for the time being, put the seemingly constant fiscal crises to rest and roll back some of the damaging austerity spending cuts that have been undermining the economic recovery.

Sally Steenland: 57,000 reasons to restore early learning

  About 57,000 children won’t be going back to preschool this month, thanks to deep cuts to Head Start programs triggered by the sequester. Their teachers and aides will be out of a job. Their parents, most of whom are working, will need to find another place for them to go. And their country—the rest of us—will lose 57,000 future citizens who developed at an early age the necessary skills to compete in the global economy and maintain America’s innovative edge.

Scott Lilly: Whack-a-Mole budgeting

  The preposterous legislative sideshow taking place around sequestration gives a pretty clear picture of how little the people who were elected to run the government actually know about it.

  Exactly four days after long-anticipated sequester furloughs began for air-traffic controllers, Congress decided the furloughs were not such a good idea after all. It also decided that perhaps it wasn’t a problem caused by an administrator trying to showboat the evils of across-the-board cuts but in fact a problem with the legislation that the members of Congress had crafted themselves—legislation directing that across-the-board cuts be taken from each program, project and activity within the $7.5 billion appropriated for air-traffic operations.

Erik Stegman and Katie Wright: Low-income victims of domestic violence facing a political super storm

  Americans across the country are bracing for the impact of the sequester, the automatic across-the-board spending cuts to domestic programs—including vital human-needs services—set for this Friday, March 1. The nation faces dire consequences should these cuts take effect, but it’s even worse for low-income women and their families suffering from domestic violence.