More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, the results of a new survey showed.
The survey comes as housing turmoil has rocked Wall Street amid an economic downturn. The economy has surpassed the war in Iraq as the dominating issue of the US presidential race and there is now nearly a national consensus that the US faces significant problems, the poll found.
A majority of Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school say the US is headed in the wrong direction, the results of the survey showed. The results were published on the New York Times’ Web site.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; while just 4 percent said it was doing better.
The newspaper said Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the poll’s inception in the early 1990s. Only 21 percent of respondents said the economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992. Two in three people said they believed the economy was already in recession.
Americans favored help for people but not for financial institutions in assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis.
A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
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