A dollar here where it's needed, a dollar there where it isn't

So congressional negotiatiors have followed up on December's budget agreement with a specific deal on spending that would take the government through the fiscal year. Ed O'Keefe has a helpful list of winners and losers in the deal.

I'm happiest to see early-childhood funding restored. I'm unhappiest to see new dollars for border security.

Sure, I would say that. I'm a bleeding-heart liberal, and I'm soft on crime! But that partisan lens isn't the only way to look at federal spending choices. What if we all agreed that secure borders are important, and that so are poor kids' chances of growing up healthy, decently educated, and no longer poor? Then we could talk less about conservative vs. liberal goals and more about how we're doing on these shared goals, and how to do better. Instead of debating the role of government as an abstraction, we could talk about the effectiveness of specific (public or private) approaches.