00:00The Missouri River churns in the Midwest on a sunny day.
00:04The Mighty Moe, as they call it in Omaha,
00:06separates eastern Nebraska on this side
00:09and western Iowa on the other.
00:11On the Nebraska side of the river,
00:14a National Park Service building,
00:16its workers and operations affected
00:18by the federal government shutdown.
00:20Straight Arrow News asked folks here in middle America
00:23their opinion on the shutdown
00:25and lawmakers' accountability.
00:30Where we're at with our Congress and our Senate right now
00:33is the total lack of accountability,
00:35not this year, not last year,
00:37but over the last eight or ten years.
00:40And every year it seems to be we get more hardened in the division.
00:44And that wasn't the way that government was meant to run.
00:47Really disappointed with the partisanship
00:50that both sides are showing.
00:52And I think the vast majority of Americans
00:56are somewhere in the middle
00:57and just want to get along and get things accomplished.
01:01And you have the extremes on the right and the left
01:03that make that very difficult.
01:06Just a few miles west of the riverfront,
01:09the headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway
01:11in that building right there,
01:13where its chairman and retiring CEO,
01:15Warren Buffett, still comes to work.
01:18The so-called Oracle of Omaha.
01:21And it's what he said a few years ago
01:23about the national deficit
01:24that is getting played these days on social media.
01:27Watch.
01:28I could end the deficit in five minutes.
01:30You just pass a law that says that
01:32any time there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP,
01:35all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
01:38Now you've got the incentives in the right place, right?
01:41And with Treasury Department numbers
01:43showing the national deficit
01:45at about $2 trillion at the end of September,
01:48the Buffett idea would certainly have
01:50a lot of political implications
01:51in next year's midterm elections and beyond.
01:55For Straight Arrow News, I'm Craig DeGrelli.
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