Did you know that about
one-fourth of the entire
global prison population is in the United States? Did you know that Apple
has more money than the U.S. Treasury? Did you know
that if you have no debt and also have 10 dollars in your wallet that you are
wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans? Did you know that
by the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen
approximately 40,000 murders on television? There are some
things that are great about the United States, and there are definitely some
things that are not so great. Once upon a time we were the most
loved and most respected nation on the entire planet, but those days are long
gone.
We have wrecked our
economy, we have lost our values and we have fumbled away our future. But
if you look close enough, you can still see many of the things that once made
this country a shining beacon to the rest of the world. This article
includes some weird facts, some fun facts, but also some very troubling
facts. It has been said that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go
down, and hopefully as people enjoy reading the fun facts in this article they
will also take note of the more serious facts. If we are ever going to
change course as a nation, we need to come to grips with just how far we have
fallen.
The following are 33
strange facts about America that most Americans would be shocked to learn…
#1 The amount of
cement that China used from 2011 to 2013 was greater than the total amount of
cement that the United States used during
the entire 20th century.
#2 In more than
half of all U.S. states, the highest paid public employee in the state is a
football coach.
#4 Almost half of
all Americans (47 percent) do not put a single penny out of their
paychecks into savings.
#5 In 2014, police
in the United States killed 1,100 people. During that same year, police in Canada
killed 14 people, police in China killed 12 people and police in Germany didn’t kill anyone
at all.
#6 The state of
Alaska is 429
times larger than the state of
Rhode Island is. But Rhode Island has a significantly
larger population than Alaska does.
#7 Alaska has a
longer coastline than all of the other 49 U.S. states put together.
#8 The city of
Juneau, Alaska is about 3,000 square miles in size. It is actually larger than
the entire state of Delaware.
#9 When LBJ’s “War
on Poverty” began, less
than 10 percent of all U.S.
children were growing up in single parent households. Today, that number
has skyrocketed to 33 percent.
#10 In 1950, less
than 5 percent of all babies in
America were born to unmarried parents. Today, that number is
over 40 percent.
#11 The poverty
rate for households that are led by a married couple is 6.8 percent. For households that are led by a female
single parent, the poverty rate is 37.1 percent.
#12 In 2013, women
earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees that were
awarded that year in the United States.
#13 According to
the CDC, 34.6 percent of all men in the U.S. are obese at this
point.
#14 The average
supermarket in the United States wastes about 3,000 pounds of
food each year.
#15 Right
now, more
than 200 million people around
the planet are officially considered to be unemployed. Meanwhile, approximately
20 percent of the garbage
that goes into our landfills is food.
#16 There is a city
in Bangladesh called Dhaka where workers are paid just
one dollar for every 1,000
bricks that they carry. Meanwhile, the “inactivity rate” for men in their
prime working years in the United States is hovering near record high levels.
#17 According to
one recent survey, 81 percent of Russians now have a negative view of
the United States. That is much higher than at the end of the Cold War
era.
#18 Montana
has three times as many cows as it does people.
#19 The grizzly
bear is the official state animal of California. But no grizzly bears
have been seen there since 1922.
#20 One recent
survey discovered that “a steady job” is the number one thing that American women
are looking for in a husband, and another
survey discovered that 75
percent of women would have a serious problem dating an unemployed man.
#21 According to a
study conducted by economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael
Osborne, 47 percent of the jobs in the United States could
soon be lost to computers, robots and other forms of technology.
#22 The only place
in the United States where coffee is grown commercially is in Hawaii.
#23 The original
name of the city of Atlanta was “Terminus“.
#24 The state with
the most millionaires per capita is Maryland.
#25 There are more
than 4
million adult websites on the Internet,
and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.
#26 86 percent of men include “having children” in their
definition of success. For women, that number is only 73 percent.
#27 One survey of
50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only 12 percent of them said that they were “very happy”.
#28 The United
States has 845 motor vehicles for every 1,000
people. Japan only has 593 for every 1,000 people, and Germany only has
540 for every 1,000 people.
#29 The average
American spends more than 10 hours a
day using an
electronic device.
#30 48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency
supplies in their homes whatsoever.
#31 There are three
towns in the United States that have the name “Santa Claus“.
#32 There is
actually a town in Michigan called “Hell“.
#33 There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in
your body. If they were stretched out in a single line, they could go
around the planet more than twice. (The
circumference of the Earth is approx. 25,000 miles – TB)
