From the right and centre: mild disgust. From the left: outright anger.
Ordinary Americans showed a range of emotions and responses to the debt-limit deal President Barack Obama and top leaders of Congress struck Sunday, but nearly none of them were positive.
Except perhaps relief that the weeks of wrangling were finally over.
Phil Waters of Anchorage, Alaska, gave a variation of the most common response.
"It should have happened a real long time ago," said Waters, a 60-year-old semi-retired helicopter mechanic as he sat inside Darwin's Theory, a downtown Anchorage bar.
"It never should have gotten this far out of hand." Waters, who described himself as an "almost Libertarian conservative," said he would have liked to see a lot more cuts than the spending reductions Obama and House Speaker John Boehner agreed to.
But Kiran Mahto of Portland, Oregon, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008, would have preferred no deal at all to the concessions the president made to congressional Republicans.
Mahto, a 35-year-old who works in health care information technology, said the agreement was the latest in a long string of times Obama had disappointed him, and vowed it would be the last.
"I'm actively opposed to this president now. That also goes for his party since they've been silent through the whole ordeal," said Mahto, who thinks the debt deal will lead to an Obama defeat in 2012.
"Cutting the deficit will do nothing to get people jobs.
Without jobs and without a liberal base, he will lose." The agreement would cut at least $US2.4 trillion ($A2.19 trillion) from federal spending over a decade, but allowed the country to avoid a first-ever debt default and extended the Treasury's authority to borrow beyond the 2012 elections.
Even the outline of the agreement, much less the details, left those without strong feelings confused and frustrated.
Brett Piper, 34, and Matthew Crosby, 30, radiologists visiting Maryland from Indianapolis for a conference, were unsure how much they could really understand.
"It's hard to know what to trust," Piper said. "The issue is made so complicated that it's tough for the average American to make sense of it." Crosby agreed. "It just makes me mad," he said. "I'm innately interested, but I just get frustrated." Piper said he was a Republican but didn't feel that he could trust the Republicans.
"It's a political game," Piper said. "And in this game, everyone looks bad."
In Philadelphia, Patrick Lucey, 25, said he thought the large federal deficit would definitely be a burden to young people like himself who would have to pay for government programs far into the future. But he was philosophical.
"It's something expected," he said of the government deficit.
"It's not a surprise." "I'll be paying bills, student loans, a mortgage for the next 30 years," he said.
"I'm not going to let this bring me down. It's one more thing I'll owe. When you're born, you start owing."
Others felt that even without grasping the details, they understood the deeper reality behind the deal.
"As long as these people let the oil companies and big business do what they do, nothing will change," said taxi driver Harvey Philpot, 52, of North Philadelphia.
"It's all about big business." And lawyer John Trotman, 42, of Philadelphia, said "I feel like the debt ceiling became an issue because the Republicans turned it into one.
It was an issue of creation. It was talking points for them. We're headed toward an election and the Republicans want to get Obama."
Many, including foreign nationals visiting the United States, were happy that worries about a debt default and international financial havoc could be put to rest. Several British tourists discussed the developments in Times Square, not far from the National Debt Clock, a billboard-size digital display showing how much money the United States owes.
They noted that Britain has had to cut costs in the past few years. "For us in Europe it's a good thing," said one of the tourists, Andrew Harris, who works for an airline. "We were waiting for them to come to an agreement.
It was really a scary thing to hear. What happens in the US always has an impact in Europe."
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