Val Minch of Hickory, NC, and a 1956 graduate of PHS sent me this interesting email, and I am forwarding it to my readers:
The following are some strange facts about America that most Americans do not know.
#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.
#3 Almost half of all Americans (47 percent) do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.
#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.
#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 is6.8 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 .
#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.
#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 Benedict Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, up to 47 percent of the jobs in the United States could soon be lost to computers, robots and other forms of technology.
#22 One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. Found that only 12 percent of them said that they were "very happy".
#24 48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies in their homes whatsoever. Even fewer have fire extinguishers.
#26 There is actually a town in Michigan called "Hell". (I wonder how far down the road from Detroit that is?)
#27 If you have no debt and also have 10 dollars in your wallet...you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.
#28 By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen approximately 40,000 murders on television.
