The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve Board this week both moved a step closer to regulating compensation at major banks and bailed-out financial firms, but most Americans have reservations about how far the government should go.

While many took a pretty hard-line view of executive compensation during the early months of the financial crisis, support for government regulation always has turned on whether a company had received a bailout.

Surveys conducted last March show that 61% believed the government should regulate the level of pay and bonuses for executives of a company that received taxpayer funding. But if no taxpayer money was involved, Americans said the government should keep its hands off.

But, what if a company was bailed out but paid the money back?

By June, 61% said that if the bailout loan was repaid, the government should not regulate a company’s executive pay and bonuses. This marked a sizable change – and a reversal of opinion - from two months earlier when 47% said the government should still have that right.

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Anger flared up early in the year with news reports that the mega-insurer American International Group (AIG) gave out $165 million in executive bonuses after it had received a $170 billion taxpayer bailout to stay in business. Seventy-six percent (76%) said the executives should give back the bonuses.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters favored imposing a 90% tax on bonuses paid by AIG and other firms that received government bailout money.

After all, government bailouts for the financial sector were always unpopular.

Fifty-nine percent (59%), in fact, said it was better for the economy to let AIG go out of business rather than providing federal subsidies to keep it afloat.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of adults said most of the taxpayer money given out as bailouts was going to the very people who created the country’s current economic crisis, anyway.

By mid-July, 80% of Americans felt that Wall Street benefited more from the bailout of the financial industry than the average U.S. taxpayer.

This finding came just after Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street recipients of a taxpayer bailout, repaid that money and reported a record profit for the previous quarter. It also announced plans for billions in employee bonuses.

Yet while corporate CEOs have consistently held the job least respected in the country this year, members of Congress edged past them for that dubious honor in polling last month.

President Obama, his top advisers and a number of senior congressional Democrats favor much greater federal regulation of the country’s financial system to prevent a repeat of last year’s meltdown. But 53% of Americans are opposed to more government regulation of the financial sector.

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