‘Total lack of accountability’: Americans grappling with real-life effects of government shutdown

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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 and western Iowa on the other.

00:11On the Nebraska side of the river, a National Park Service building,

00:16its workers and operations affected by the federal government shutdown.

00:20Straight Arrow News asked folks here in middle America

00:23their opinion on the shutdown and lawmakers' accountability.

00:30Where we're at with our Congress and our Senate right now

00:33is the total lack of accountability, not 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 that both sides are showing.

00:53And I think the vast majority of Americans are 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 that make that very difficult.

01:06Just a few miles west of the riverfront,

01:09the headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway in that building right there,

01:13where its chairman and retiring CEO, Warren Buffett, still comes to work.

01:18The so-called Oracle of Omaha.

01:21And it's what he said a few years ago about 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 anytime 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?

01:42And with Treasury Department numbers showing the national deficit

01:45at about $2 trillion at the end of September,

01:48the Buffett idea would certainly have a lot of political implications

01:51in next year's midterm elections and beyond.

01:55For Straight Arrow News, I'm Craig DeGrowley.