Survey
A Money magazine survey found that Americans are becoming less honest. Twenty-four percent of respondents said they wouldn’t correct a waiter who undercharged them. In a similar poll conducted in 1987, only 15 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t correct the waiter.
What would you do if you found a wallet containing $1,000? Twenty-four percent of this year’s respondents said they’d keep the cash, compared with 4 percent a decade ago. People ages 18-34 were 10 times more likely to keep the money than people 65 and older.
Nearly one-third of the respondents said they’d cheat on their income taxes. The rich seemed especially fond of tax fraud. Forty-five percent of Americans with annual incomes exceeding $50,000 said they wouldn’t report $2,000 in cash income on their tax returns, compared with 24 percent of those earning less than $15,000.
A quarter of the respondents said they’d commit a crime for $10 million if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. Men (31 percent) were twice as likely to do so than women (16 percent).