Tonight's Debate: Will Our Children Fare Better than Us?

This debate underscored the central question that each of us must ask ourselves before choosing our next president: Will our children and our children's children fare better than us?

Since 2001, we have spent hundreds of billions on two wars, and that doesn't even take into account anticipated further spending requests throughout the next few years to sustain these wars. Yet tonight, Senator McCain called for a federal budget freeze that would literally leave millions of children and families out in the cold.

In America today 13 million children are living in poverty and nearly 9 million are living without health coverage. I fear that these upside-down political priorities will be our nation's Achilles heel in our ability to compete in a global economy. If our next leader is willing to continue to spend billions on the wars but refuses to adequately fund programs designed to protect America's most vulnerable, what does that say about our nation's moral compass?

Read more reactions to the first presidential debate from HuffPost bloggers, including Nora Ephron, Bob Shrum, Madeleine Albright, Paul Reiser, Arianna Huffington, Sean Penn, Sheryl Crow, and more.