“The main accomplishment of this bill was to make permanent most of the Bush tax cuts, and the Republicans seem to be ticked off about it and the Democrats are crowing about it. If you go back to 2007, this would have seemed like Alice in Wonderland,” said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget-watchdog group. “If you see it as an attempt to deal with the long-term structural deficit, it’s a near failure.”