Linda Forest cringes when she thinks about the millions of dollars corporate chief executives earn. She believes greed is to blame for the nation's economic crisis.
So the third-grade teacher from DeSoto, Texas, believes the pendulum needs to swing away from a less-regulated business environment to one with more government intervention and oversight to lift the country out of its morass.
She is among the majority of Americans who favor the idea of Washington stepping in to prevent any further collapse of the nation's economy, according to a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll.
"I'm hesitant to get government involved," said Forest, 46, who was contacted in a follow-up interview. "But I do know there needs to be intervention. They need to do it with a watchful eye."
The survey of 1,000 adults was taken Saturday through Monday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The poll showed that most of those surveyed favored increasing government intervention in the economy, and half blamed lack of regulation for many of the nation's current woes.
About two-thirds back tighter regulation of banks and financial institutions, and half said the federal government should take an ownership stake in banks and other industries to save the private sector.
Asked whether such moves would constitute a step toward socialism, about half said yes, but just 20% said that this worried them "a lot."
Most also said they favored President-elect Barack Obama's plan to engage in public works projects as a way to kick-start the economy, and 60% favored helping individual homeowners who face foreclosure.
The poll, which was completed before Wednesday's announcement of a plan to issue $14 billion in emergency loans to automakers, found lukewarm support for helping the car industry, even though 88% agreed that a collapse of the major car companies would be a problem for the country.
Forty-seven percent of Americans favored some sort of financial rescue for automakers, slightly more than the 42% who opposed a rescue.
Forty-eight percent of those polled said the federal government should let financial institutions fail, and 34% said they should be rescued.
Americans drew the line when it came to restricting pay. Fifty-three percent opposed prohibiting companies that receive assistance through the Treasury Department rescue plan from paying CEOs or executives more than $400,000 a year, the same salary as the U.S. president. Thirty-six percent favored the salary limit.
