Dear Mr or Mrs President,

Every person in America would have to pay $61,000 to pay for the $19.6 trillion dollars in debt we have accumulated. We keep spending money on “pure spends” and not putting our money in investments that will later give long term benefits. I believe that we should start investing our money into programs that will benefit us, and stop throwing our money towards “pure spends”. Pure spends are investments on things that you do not get a return on, for example, healthcare. One of our biggest yearly costs is health care programs. Just last year, Medicare alone costed us $527 billion dollars, and we will not get any return on that investment. It’s this kind of spending that has got us to where we are today. At the rate we are going, the federal debt is projected to be 22.1 trillion dollars in the year 2020, and when the now low interest rates go back to normal, it will be unsustainable. Another big cost is social security. In 2013 the cost for social security was over $880 billion dollars. Some people say that social security is “a necessary evil” but social security has lead to increased expenditures without obvious pay off. And due to the increasing lifespan of the average american, the more beneficiaries we have to pay for. Finally, our defense and military expenses. Defense expenses are The costs that the U.S.A. spends on defending ourselves and our allies. The U.S.A has a lot of presence around the world, because of this, we will be involved in a lot of foreign affairs. Only a few years ago we spent over 700 billion dollars towards military defense expenses.They say that this cost is necessary to help in foreign affairs, often stating “it supports peacekeeping in foreign countries” but we should be more focused on keeping this debt down. As I suggested earlier, we can't have it both ways. If we keep giving our money to pure spends, we won't get a return on it. By giving money to education and other things that will give us a return on our money, and we can solve this problem.