 Hi, my name is Carly Town, co-director of Code Pink. President Biden recently announced the withdrawal of all United States troops from Afghanistan by September 2021, signaling the end of the so-called war on terror. Why then did he also propose a $753 billion Pentagon budget for 2022 that's $13 billion more expensive than the last budget enacted under the Trump administration? A dangerous bipartisan consensus is converging in Washington to ramp up a new Cold War and arms race with China based on unfounded fearmongering and racist stereotypes to justify unlimited U.S. military budgets. As former President Jimmy Carter stated, while the United States has been at war for 20 years, China has instead invested in 21st century infrastructure and in its own people, lifting 800 million of them out of poverty. Now that the United States has quietly admitted defeat in the so-called war on terror, we can't allow unlimited U.S. military budgets to become the new normal. We must begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs and instead invest in a 21st century peace dividend. So what is a peace dividend? Putsibly, a peace dividend is an economic boost a country gets from peace that follows a war. At that time, the government should reduce military spending and reallocate the money to other policy priorities. And this is not a new concept, right? At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that U.S. military spending could safely be cut by over half over the next 10 years. That goal was never achieved and instead of a post-Cold War peace dividend, the military industrial complex exploited the crimes of September 11th, 2001, to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race. Between 2003 and 2011 alone, the U.S. accounted for 45% of global military spending. Now, the military industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with China to continue to justify record-level military spending year after year. And we can't let that happen. We need to reduce the Pentagon budget and instead invest in a peace dividend, which would mean actually funding programs to address poverty in the United States. You can go to codepink.org slash peace dividend to learn more about how you can get involved and take action.