Astonishing Facts

By Michae Snyder 

- BLN Contributing Writer  

If our Founding Fathers were alive today, what would they think of America? 
Surely they would be very proud that the United States stretches from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and has built some of the most amazing cities that the
world has ever seen.  They would probably be surprised that the country
they founded went on to become the greatest economic machine in the history of
the world, and they would be absolutely astounded by things like our interstate
highway system and the Internet.  However, there are quite a number of
things that they would be horrified about as well.  The fact that over 40
million Americans are dependent on the federal government for their daily food
would be deeply disturbing to our founders.  Also, the fact that the U.S.
government has accumulated the greatest mountain of debt in human history would
be incredibly distressing to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of
the founders.  But perhaps most of all, our founders would be absolutely
disgusted that the land where Americans could once be free to pursue life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness has become so tightly regulated and
controlled that Americans dare not even squeak without the permission of the
federal government.  

Needless to say, our founders would certainly not understand many of our
institutions or many of the advanced technologies that we have today.  But
without a doubt they would be able to grasp how far we have fallen as a nation
and how far we have strayed from the fundamental principles that they enshrined
in our founding documents.  The United States is a much different place
today than it was in 1776, and unfortunately many of the changes have been for
the worse.
 

The following are 50 mind blowing facts about modern America that our
Founding Fathers never would have believed….
 

#1 In 2010, not only does the United States have a central bank, but it also
runs our economy and issues all of our currency. 

The Federal Reserve has devalued the U.S. dollar by over 95 percent since
1913 and it has been used to create the biggest mountain of government debt in
the history of the world.
& 

#2 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

has ruled that U.S. government agents can legally sneak onto your property
in the middle of the night, place a secret GPS device on the bottom of your car
and keep track of you everywhere that you go.
 

#3 The 50 wealthiest members of Congress saw their collective fortunes
increase by 85.1 million dollars to
$1.4 billion in 2009.
 

#4 The U.S. government has accumulated a

national debt that is rapidly approaching the 14 trillion dollar mark.
 

#5 All over the United States, asphalt roads are being ground up and are
being replaced with gravel

because it is cheaper to maintain.  The state of South Dakota has
transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and
38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have now turned some of their
asphalt roads into gravel roads.
 

#6 Americans now owe more than $849 billion on

student loans, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on
their credit cards.
 

#7 In 2010, Americans waste an astounding amount of food. 

According to a study by the California Integrated Waste Management board, 63
percent of the average supermarket’s waste stream is food. When you break that
down, it means that each supermarket wastes approximately 3,000 pounds of food
each year.
 

#8 The city of Cleveland plans
to sort through curbside trash to ensure that people are actually recycling
properly.  If it is discovered that some citizens are not recycling they
will be hit with very large fines.
 

#9 Once upon a time, U.S. industry was the envy of the world.  But since
1979, manufacturing employment in the United States has
fallen by 40 percent.
 

#10 Even though the U.S. population has exploded in size, the number of
Americans with manufacturing jobs today is smaller than
the number of Americans who were employed in manufacturing in 1950.
 

#11 Having one out of every eight Americans enrolled in the food stamp
program is now considered “the
new normal” and Americans continue to drop into poverty in astounding
numbers.
 

#12

One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one
government anti-poverty program.
 

#13

A family of four actually has difficulty surviving on an income of $50,000 a
year in America in 2010.
 

#14 Barack Obama is backing a proposal to create a national database that
will store the DNA of all individuals who have been arrested, even if they
end up not being convicted of a crime.
 

#15 In 2010, it takes the average unemployed American worker over
8 months to find a job.
 

#16 The U.S. government has made some parts of Arizona off limits to U.S.
citizens because of the threat of violence from Mexican drug smugglers. 
The federal government

has actually posted signs more than 100 miles north of the Mexican border
warning travelers that certain areas are unsafe because of drug and alien
smugglers.
 

#17 One recent survey of last year’s college graduates discovered

that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation.
 

#18 In one of the very first military commissions held under the Obama
administration, a U.S. military judge ruled that confessions obtained by
threatening the subject with rape

are admissible in court.
 

#19 The average American worker now pays literally

dozens of different kinds of taxes each year.
 

#20 In recent years the U.S. government has spent $2.6 million tax dollars

to study the drinking habits of Chinese prostitutes

and $400,000 tax dollars to pay researchers to cruise six bars in Buenos
Aires, Argentina to
find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior when drunk.
 

#21 Christians are being arrested and thrown in jail in some areas of the
United States

for quietly passing out Christian literature on public sidewalks. And yet
Muslims run wild with no interference.
 

#22 The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it
will begin using cutting edge analysis software

to predict crime by young delinquents and will place “potential
offenders” in prevention and education programs.
 

#23 Organic milk is now considered such a national crisis that the FDA has
been

conducting military style raids on Amish farmers in the state
of Pennsylvania.
 

#24 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that they are
considering a crackdown

on farm dust.
 

#25 According to a new CDC report,

nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis.
 

#26 Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts says that due to severe
budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department

will simply not be able to respond to any longer.  The crimes that the
Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary,
car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.
 

#27 Today, Americans are losing their homes in staggering numbers. 

One out of every seven mortgages was delinquent or in foreclosure during the
first quarter of 2010.
 

#28 Many of our leading scientists are now calling themselves “transhumanists”
and are openly proclaiming that a

future where men have fully merged with machines is inevitable.
 

#29 Americans

who spend large amounts of cash are viewed as “potential criminals” by the
U.S. government in 2010.
 

#30 New full body security scanners going into airports all across the United
States

can actually see through our clothing and produce very clear and very detailed
images of our exposed bodies as we walk through them.
 

#31 The U.S. financial system has become a massive gambling parlor in
2010.  As a result, a horrific derivatives
bubble 

has developed that threatens to destroy our entire economy at any moment. 
Nobody knows exactly how big the derivatives bubble is, but low estimates place
it at around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5
quadrillion dollars.  Once that bubble pops there simply will not be enough
money in the entire world to fix it.
 

#32 The U.S. government is spending an amount of money equivalent to

approximately 25.4 percent of GDP t this year.

#33 Today, 10,000 people

make 30% of the total income in the United States.
 

#34 A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation discovered
that 250 employees of the Defense Department used credit cards or PayPal to
purchase images of children in sexual situations.  However, the
investigation also found that the Pentagon investigated

only a handful of those cases.
 

#35 According to a recent poll of Americans between the ages of 44 and 75,
61% said that running out money

was their biggest fear. The remaining 39% thought death was scarier.
 

#36

Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama’s 3.8 trillion dollar budget for
2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is
spent on their behalf.
 

#37 A recent Department of Justice guide for investigators of criminal and
extremist groups

lists “constitutionalists” and “survivalists” alongside organizations like
Al-Qaeda and the Aryan Brotherhood.
 

#38 The U.S.

trade deficit has exploded to nightmarish proportions over the past two
decades.  Every single month tens of billions more dollars goes out of the
United States than comes into it.  Essentially, the United States is
becoming far poorer as a nation each and every month.
 

#39

Factories are closing in droves across the United States because the
American people would rather buy things made in China.
 

#40 Millions upon millions of good paying middle class jobs are being shipped
off to China and
they are never coming back.  Meanwhile, U.S. politicians stand by idly
and do nothing.
 

#41 Some analysts now believe that China could become the largest economy in
the world

by the year 2020.
 

#42 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like
all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget
deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of four
to five trillion dollars.
 

#43 According to one recent survey,

28% of all U.S. households have at least one person that is currently
searching for a full-time job.

#44 The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value.  An item that
cost $20.00 in 1970 will cost you
$112.35 today.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 will cost you

$440.33 today.
 

#45 Major international organizations are actually proposing that the United
States start considering the adoption of a truly global
currency.
 

#46 Students at a high school in Missouri have built a car that they claim
can get up to

450 miles per gallon 

.  On another note, some of the top energy experts in the world believe
that thorium could solve
our energy problems and supply very cheap energy for society for hundreds of
thousands of years.  But in today’s world technologies such as these are
endlessly suppressed by the rich and powerful.
 

#47 One Colorado high school student is seeking an explanation from officials
at his school after he was ordered by security guards

to remove American flags from his truck because they might make other
students at the high school ”uncomfortable”.
 

#48 Three California high school students were
recently forced to remove their American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo.
 

#49 Memorial crosses erected along Utah public roads to honor fallen state
troopers

have been found unconstitutional by a federal appeals court and now must be
removed permanently.
 

#50 One group of high school students made national headlines recently when
they revealed that a security guard ordered them to
stop singing the national anthema during during a visit to the Lincoln Memorial .