US Statistics from 2024 that are both shocking and horrifying

44 Statistics From 2024 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

By Michael Synder, 31 December 2024

2024 was definitely one of the wildest years that any of us have ever experienced. During the past 12 months, Donald Trump was convicted by a New York jury, he was almost assassinated, he won the presidential election and he was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. Nobody has ever had a year quite like that.

Of course, 2024 was also a year of war. Israel battled Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, the government of Syria was overthrown by radical Islamists, long-range missiles provided by NATO started raining down on targets deep inside Russia and Russian forces stormed even deeper into eastern Ukraine.

2024 also brought us Hurricane Helene, a “Great American eclipse,” and “the comet of the century.”

Now here we are at the end of the year, and we are being told to brace ourselves for a bird flu pandemic. I have a feeling that the year ahead is going to be absolutely nuts, but for a moment I wanted to look back at the crazy year that we just went through. The following are 44 statistics from 2024 that are almost too crazy to believe.

#1 Over 155 million votes were cast in the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump’s win in that election capped what many consider to be the greatest political comeback in US history.

#2 Nearly 11 billion dollars was spent during the 2024 election cycle. That is the most money ever spent on an election by a very wide margin.

#3 1.2 billion dollars was spent on political ads in the state of Pennsylvania alone.

#4 Before the election, one survey found that 79 per cent of Americans believed that the nation was on the wrong track.

#5 The US government is currently $36,144,183,375,647.43 in debt.

#6 If our politicians keep spending money at the current rate, the US government will be 51 trillion dollars in debt four years from now.

#7 Total US household debt is nearing 18 trillion dollars.

#8 The number of shoplifting incidents per year in the United States is up 93 per cent compared to pre-pandemic levels.

#9 On a single day in December, Joe Biden announced that he was commuting the prison sentences of nearly 1,500 criminals and he issued full pardons to 39 others.

#10 The US Census Bureau says that 37 per cent of Americans are having trouble even paying their most basic bills.

#11 According to Bank of America, almost a third of all households “spend more than 95% of their disposable income on necessities such as housing costs, groceries and utility bills.”

#12 The price of orange juice is up 327 per cent over the last 3 years.

#13 The average household in Miami spends 327 dollars during a single trip to the grocery store.

#14 It now takes more than $100,000 a year for a typical US household to live “the American Dream” in all 50 states, and in 29 US states it takes more than $150,000 a year.

#15 For the average person, it now costs 4.4 million dollars to live “the American Dream” over the course of a lifetime.

#16 Thanks to rampant inflation, the average American now believes that it takes an income of $270,000 a year to be “financially successful.”

#17 Overall, US home prices are up more than 1,000 per cent since 1974.

#18 Only 10 per cent of Americans believe that becoming a homeowner is “easy or somewhat easy.”

#19 37 per cent of US cardholders have already maxed out at least one credit card.

#20 The amount of money that Americans owe on their credit cards is twice as large as the gross domestic product (“GDP”) of the 100 poorest nations on the entire planet combined.

#21 30 per cent of all student loan borrowers have “gone without food or medicine due to their monthly bills.”

#22 At one food bank in New Jersey, demand has actually quadrupled since the peak of the pandemic.

#23 An all-time record high 770,000 people are homeless in the United States, and that number grew by 18 per cent in just one year, which is also an all-time record high.

#24 We are being told that more than 3 million Americans are now living in their vehicles.

#25 The number of job openings in the United States has fallen by about 4 million since 2021.

#26 US retailers have announced 7,100 store closures in 2024.

#27 For the 12 months ending 30 June, the number of business bankruptcy filings was up more than 40 per cent compared to the previous 12 months.

#28 An office building in Manhattan that sold for 332 million dollars in 2006 sold for just 8.5 million dollars in 2024.

#29 Half of all workers in the US make less than $43,222.81 a year.

#30 According to Bank of America, from 2019 to 2024 there was a 10 per cent jump in those that are living paycheque to paycheque.

#31 According to the US Census Bureau, 29 per cent of all US households were one-person households in 2024.

#32 40 per cent of Americans report feeling lonely at least some of the time.

#33 30 per cent of Americans have been clinically diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives.

#34 The market capitalisation of Fartcoin is currently 973 million dollars. Meanwhile, the market capitalisation of Office Depot is just 680 million dollars.

#35 According to the US Census Bureau, 46.2 million people who were not born in the United States are now living here.

#36 The federal government has admitted that there are approximately “425,000 convicted criminals living in the US illegally.”

#37 According to North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, the total damage caused by Hurricane Helene in his state exceeds 50 billion dollars.

#38 According to the official website of the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”), Congress had appropriated a total of 174 billion dollars for the war in Ukraine as of April.

#39 According to the Institute for Economics & Peace, there are 56 active military conflicts raging around the world right now. That is the highest number that we have seen since World War II.

#40 According to the United Nations, there are over 2 billion people who eat insects as part of their normal diets right now.

#41 It is being projected that the market for insect protein in the United States will be valued at 274 billion dollars in 2031.

#42 Sperm counts have fallen by more than 50 per cent since 1973. If this trend continues, soon we will not be able to produce enough viable offspring and the human population of this planet will plummet dramatically.

#43 Our brains are slowly but surely filling up with plastic. One team of scientists discovered that human brain samples from 2024 had concentrations of microplastics that were 50 per cent higher than human brain samples from 2016.

#44 If the amount of plastic in our brains continues to rise at a rate of 50 per cent every 8 years, 28 per cent of our brains will be plastic 80 years from now and everyone will be dead.