Car Salesmen And Members Of Congress At Bottom Of Trust Ratings

Americans do not trust car salesmen, members of Congress and lobbyists. That list not unusual. Nor is the list of the most trusted professions–nurses, military officers and pharmacists.

A new Gallup poll asked people to rate the honesty and ethics of a number of professions. Each was rated by respondents as having trustworthiness that was “high/very high”, “average”, or “low/very low”.

It is not at the bottom or top of the list where professions begin to fall into patterns which may reflect how Americans interact with the people they see many days. Clergy, for example, get a relatively poor rating. That is probably because they are seen as people who push their points of view about faith on others who don’t want to hear it.

Judges rate poorly, an indication of the cynicism with which Americans look at the justice system–a pillar of US government and the one which is critical to the impression of whether government is fair.

Bankers get low ratings. That should not come as a shock in a period when few people can get a loan, and there is still a perception that the bank industry was the trigger of the collapse of the credit markets, and therefore, the recession.

“Stability is generally the norm in Americans’ ratings of the honesty and ethics of professions, but Americans’ opinions do shift in response to real-world events, mostly scandals, that reflect poorly on a profession,” Gallup says. That does not save members of Congress and car sales people from a perpetual place at the bottom of the list. At least Congress still meets regularly and people still buy cars. That may be a sign of hypocrisy or perhaps just the need of Americans to be governed and drive from one place to another

Douglas A. McIntyre

“Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Nov. 19-21, 2010, with a random sample of 1,037 adults, aged 18 and older, living in the continental U.S., selected using random-digit-dial sampling.”