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

The Missouri River churns in the Midwest on a sunny day

The mighty Moe, as they call it in Omaha, separates eastern Nebraska on this side and western Iowa on the other

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

its workers and operations affected by the federal government shutdown. Straight Arrow News asked folks here in middle America

their opinion on the shutdown and lawmakers' accountability. Where we're at with our Congress and our Senate right now is the total lack of accountability, not this year, not last year, but over the last eight or 10 years

And every year, it seems to be more hardened in the division

And that wasn't the way that government was meant to run. Really disappointed with the partisanship that both sides are showing

And I think the vast majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle and just want to get along and get things accomplished And you have the extremes on the right and the left that make that very difficult

Just a few miles west of the riverfront, the headquarters of Berkshire Hathaway in that building right there

where its chairman and retiring CEO Warren Buffett still comes to work, the so-called Oracle of Omaha

And it's what he said a few years ago about the national deficit that is getting played these days on social media

Watch. I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP

all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Now you've got the incentives in the right place, right

And with Treasury Department numbers showing the national deficit at about $2 trillion at the end of September

the Buffett idea would certainly have a lot of political implications in next year's midterm elections and beyond

For Straight Arrow News, I'm Craig DeGrelli