While Occupy Wall Street may not have a 59 point plan to improve the economy or even a new tax structure in slogan form, their general message is clear enough. OWS protesters are upset with income inequality and pervasive unemployment, while some parts of the economy — read: the financial sector — have continued to do well (although Tuesday’s earnings report from Goldman Sachs shows that even financial firms are feeling the pressure).
But a new USA Today/Gallup poll shows that this feeling is not reserved to just young people currently occupying Wall Street. 44 percent of American adults in the new survey say that the current economic structure is “personally unfair to them,” hinting that overall frustration with the economy is not so much defined as pro or anti-capitalist as the accepted American belief, but that it’s just not working particularly well.
But whatever their thoughts on the system, Americans say there’s plenty of blame to go around: more than 78 percent of adults blamed Wall Street for all the economic problems, while 87 percent pointed the finger at Washington.
“You see the frustration that there’s some serious things wrong with capitalism in America, but you also see the conundrum — how do we change it?” says Terry Madonna, a political analyst and polling expert at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “This crisis coincides with a huge debate over the role of government.” He says some of the 64% who place primary blame on Washington fault it for too little government regulation, while others blame it for too much regulation.
The USA Today/Gallup poll also showed that most Americans don’t have an solid opinion about the Occupy Wall Street protests, nor does a majority support either OWS or the Tea Party. But the data does show that a majority was following OWS closely, and are clearly feeling frustration toward the institutions that are tasked with helping to get the economy going again, which is clearly having an impact in itself.
The poll was conducted by Gallup using 1,064 live telephone interviews with American adults from October 15th and 16th. It has a sampling error of 4 percent.
