The following are some strange facts about America that most Americans would be shocked to learn… (Highlighted items contain a url link.)

#1      In more than half of all states in the  United States of America , the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.

#2      It costs the U.S. government 1.8 cents to mint a penny and 9.4 cents to mint a nickel.

#3      Almost half of all Americans ( 47 percent) do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.

#4      Apple has more money than the U.S. Treasury.

#5      The state of Alaska is 429 times larger than the state of Rhode Island.  But Rhode Island has a significantly larger population than Alaska does.

#6      Alaska has a longer coastline than all of the other 49 U.S. states put together.

#7      The city of Juneau , Alaska , is about 3,000 square miles in size.  It is actually larger than the entire state of Delaware .

#8      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 .

#9      In 1950, less than 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents. Today, that number is over 40 percent .

#10    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 .

#11    In 2013, women earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees that were awarded that year in the United States .

#12    According to the CDC, 34.6 percent of all men in the U.S. are obese at this point.

#13    The average supermarket in the United States wastes about 3,000 lbs of food each year.  Meanwhile, approximately 20 percent of the garbage that goes into our landfills is food.

#14    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.

#15    Montana has three times as many cows as it does people.

#16    The grizzly bear is the official state animal of California.  But no grizzly bears have been seen there since 1922.

#17    One recent survey discovered that “a steady job” is the number one thing that American women are looking for in a husband, and discovered that 75 percent of women would have a serious problem dating an unemployed man.

#18    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.

#19     The only place in the United States where coffee is grown commercially is in Hawaii.

#20    The original name of the city of Atlanta was “Terminus“.

#21    The state with the most millionaires per capita is Maryland.

#22    One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only12 percent  of them said that they were “very happy”.

#23      The United States has 845 motor vehicles for every 1,000 people.

#25     48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies in their homes whatsoever.

#26    There are three towns in the United States that have the name “Santa Claus“.

#27    There is actually a town in Michigan called “Hell“.

#28     If you have no debt and also have 10 dollars in your wallet then you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.

#29    By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen approximately 40,000 murders  on television.

And now the summary/opinion. More to think about!   Once upon a time we were the most loved and most respected nation on the entire planet, but those days are 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. If we are ever going to change course as a nation, we need to come to grips with just how far we have fallen.