Dear Mr. Trump,

While researching your policies and your views on current issues I had some questions and concerns about your military policy. You want to increase all sections of the military for example the number of active duty troops, number of ships in the navy, number of aircraft and the number of marine corps battalions. While your reasoning for wanting to increase our military is sound, do you really think we need to spend more money on military? As a country we account for 40% of the worlds military spending and spend $691.22 billion dollars in one year. That is ridiculous considering that we our one country out of 257. Because we spend so much money every year already and are already the strongest military in the world why do we need to spend more? Why not spend money on education and feeding America?

As you have stated on your web site the US is out performed by many countries in the world in education standards. As a world power we should have one of the smartest countries not just an average country. With this why would you would to increase military spending instead of focusing on education. The US spent $107.6 billion dollars on education in 2012 and in the same year we spent 7 times that on military. If our military is the best in the world but our education isn’t we should focus on education. I know that in your plan for education you plan on spending an additional $20 billion dollars on education at the federal level but that is only 3% of our military budget. Looking at these numbers it’s pretty obvious to me that you don’t value the education of kids nearly as much as you should.

Millions of Americans each day don’t have food to eat, to feed their children or even enough food to live. Millions of Americans live in poverty and our homeless. These issues are in our own country and can be seen walking on the streets and talking to people in every community. With these issues needing to be solved spending money on the military seems ill advised and unnecessary. Now that I have stated my reasoning I would like to ask you again, whey do want to increase military spending when we are already the world power, our education system is lacking and millions of Americans are in poverty and are hungry?

From,

Nate Lewis

Lake Washington High school