The lesson out of all this for Congress should be this: Focus on the long-term, not the short-term. The falling deficits of the next few years don’t solve the bigger longer-term problems the United States faces, on reining in rapidly rising health care costs and an unwieldy and frequently unfair tax code. But as we’ve spent the last two years of fiscal brinksmanship fighting over how much the government will tax and spend tomorrow and the next day, there has been no real movement on those longer-term goals. If nothing else, the progress in deficit reduction should allow lawmakers space to look a bit over the horizon.

Makin sums it up this way: “Moving forward, it is important for the US Congress to take yes for an answer to the question of whether it has already achieved substantial deficit reduction. Perhaps by accident, Congress has in fact reduced the US budget deficit by enough to enable working at long-term fiscal reform, including the aforementioned reform of the tax and entitlement systems over the next year.”