(MONEY Magazine) – If the recent parade of disturbing headlines about such prominent figures as Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, onetime commodity investor Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Reagans' disrobing daughter Patti Davis hasn't convinced you that America is falling into an ethical abyss, take a look at the findings of MONEY's latest national poll. According to our telephone survey of 1,000 adults conducted in June by ICR Survey Research Group of Media, Pa. (margin of error: plus or minus three percentage points), nearly one-third of Americans would cheat on their income taxes and nearly two out of five would be willing to use a shady commodity broker to score some extra bucks. What's worse, the public's ethical standards are dropping. For example, a 1987 MONEY poll of 2,250 adults nationwide found that just 15% said they wouldn't correct a restaurant waiter who undercharged them; now 24% say they wouldn't speak up. Seven years ago, only 4% said that if they found a wallet with $100 in it they'd keep the cash; today 9% would pocket the dough. We discovered too that the young generally are less ethical than the old and that men tend to be more dishonest than women. Here are the specifics on five of the questions we asked: -- If you found a wallet with complete identification and $1,000 cash in it, would you keep the money? Some 13% said yes (vs. the 9% who would keep a wallet with $100), but young folks had much stickier fingers than the elderly. People between 18 and 34 years old were the greediest: one out of five (21%) said they would take the money and run, compared with just 2% of those respondents age 65 or older. Gary Edwards, president of the Ethics Resource Center, a non-profit educational and research group in Washington, D.C., warns that "our schools, families and religious groups have failed to transmit our society's shared values to the young." -- If you earned $2,000 in cash for sideline work, would you report the income on your tax return? Fully 32% confessed they would stiff the Internal Revenue Service. And with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rich are greedier than you and I: They're far more willing to cheat on their taxes. A whopping 45% of adults with household incomes of $50,000 or more said they wouldn't report $2,000 in cash income on their tax returns, vs. 24% of those earning less than $15,000 a year. Americans have long suspected as much: 15 months before hotel queen Leona Helmsley went to jail in 1992 for tax fraud, a MONEY poll asked 500 adults to name the group most likely to cheat on taxes. Bingo! A resounding 75% correctly fingered the rich. -- Would you commit a crime if you could walk away with $10 million without getting caught? Sure, said 23% of those polled, though men (31%) were considerably more likely to do it than women (16%). Far fewer people (8%) would commit a crime for a mere $100,000, however. Crime was also less enticing -- no matter what the financial payoff -- when we told people that in order to keep the cash they would have to spend two years behind bars, as former junk bond multimillionaire Michael Milken did after pleading guilty to securities-related felonies in 1991. Only 11% said they would do time for $10 million; a paltry 2% would trade their freedom for $100,000. -- If you had a commodity broker who could make extra money for you by giving you preferential treatment over his other customers, would you give him your business? The First Lady's former commodity broker, Robert "Red" Bone, appears to have given her extra-special treatment. Plenty of Americans would welcome favors for their commodity brokerage accounts too. By the way, more people (39%) said they would use a commodity broker who gave them preferential treatment than said they would do any of the other dirty deeds that we questioned them about. -- Would you marry someone you didn't love for money? Score one for Cupid: A smashing 93% said no way. And the old female-gold-digger stereotype doesn't hold up either: The difference in the proportion of women (6%) and men (8%) who say that they would marry for money is not statistically significant. Interestingly, though, our survey shows that Americans who are in the upper- middle-income group are a lot more willing than lower-middle-income folks to marry up today. A sizable 9% of people with household incomes of $40,000 or higher said that they would marry for riches, while only 2% of people with household incomes of $15,000 to $25,000 would fall for money alone.