65% of Americans expect a recession, poll finds

NEW YORK – Forty-six percent of Americans say the economy is doing well, the lowest rate since February 2003, a Bloomberg-Los Angeles Times survey found. That’s down from 57 percent in a similar poll in June, according to Bloomberg News.
“I’m starting to think there’s a good possibility of recession,” respondent Roger Sharp, 63, a Republican and retired procurement analyst in Milwaukie, Ore., said in the latest poll. “The housing industry is driving the economy down and people are starting to get laid off from jobs that have been around for a long time.” Sixty-five percent of respondents agreed, 5 percent more than in the April poll. More than 20 percent of respondents in the latest survey called a recession “very likely” and more than 40 percent “somewhat likely,” while only 9 percent see a recession within the next year as not at all likely. The poll of 1,209 adults, conducted Friday and Saturday, had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Sixty-eight percent of the public said the country is “seriously off on the wrong track.” The performance of President George W. Bush got a thumbs-down from 60 percent of voters. The Democrat-controlled Congress was panned by nearly 70 percent, though respondents were closely split over whether it supports Bush too much or too little.
The tax cuts Bush pushed through in his first term were unpopular even among members of the highest-income group, earning more than $100,000 per year. About two-thirds of all respondents said they haven’t benefited from the cuts, while 60 percent said they’d repeal them to help pay for universal health care – a plan favored by several Democratic presidential candidates and most of the highest-income respondents.
“Republican candidates who think that tax cuts are the way to swing this election may be engaging in some wishful thinking,” Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington, D.C., told Bloomberg News. Instead of tax cuts, poll respondents favored health and education spending – by 52 percent to 36 percent – as a better economic stimulus. “In the end, it would cut costs,” said Michelle Scranton, 29, a dietician from Carroll, Iowa.