Is the U.S.A. a "City on a Hill?"

I believe that in general, people consider the USA as a “city on a hill.” I would argue that this belief is false for many reasons. If the US is a country to look up to, it is mostly by default. We have basically gotten ourselves into a “best of the worst” position. Honestly, at this point, we probably aren’t even that. As a country, we are 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, 4th in labor force, and4th in exports, out of 206 sovereign states. The only areas we lead are number of people incarcerated per capita, and defense, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of which are our allies. Can anyone say redundancy?
Our military is our highest expenditure unnecessarily. We already have the strongest military force, even without having the largest military. We also have a plethora of comrades. So why do we continue spending 600+ billion dollars a year on defense?
As for how our people are viewed, even with how often we needlessly attempt to help other countries, and with our enormous amount of non-profit organizations for other countries, we are viewed as a generally fat, lazy, rude, and selfish people. So, why do we continue to help so much, when we ourselves are already in debt? I should open up a non-profit to save America!
As I stated earlier, we are number 1 in the world for citizens incarcerated per capita. Our police force fills our prisons with minor legal offenders, and when someone does something major, the person is much more likely to get life without parole rather than the death penalty, even with 33 states having the sentence. Both these things cause a large amount of taxes to be spent on prisons.
One of the only things our legal system has going for it is trial by jury, but even that is being corrupted because of technology. A jury is supposed to be an impartial committee outside of the crimes area, but with so much technology,...