The Supreme Court on Tuesday will take up two challenges to President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program -- an initiative aimed at providing targeted debt relief to millions of student-loan borrowers -- that has so far been stalled by legal challenges.

US president Joe Biden’s war chest of subsidies for chip manufacturers comes with strings attached. Those seeking funds will have to offer employees a specific perk: provide affordable, high-quality childcare.

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American intelligence officials are concerned that China is considering sending lethal aid to Russia. The West must increase the speed and scale of aid to Ukraine, to remind Beijing that it should stay out of a war Moscow is going to lose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Judy Blume goes all the way. The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden Dear Therapist: My daughter’s stepbrother is actually her father.

More Than Warnings

Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against an innocent neighbor, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his diplomats have said many of the right things, warning against escalation in Ukraine, including the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and reaffirming the principle of state sovereignty in international affairs. But China has also, of course, tried to provide support for a fellow authoritarian regime by continuing trade with Russia, criticizing Western sanctions, and in general pretending that Putin’s war of aggression—including his many crimes against humanity—is just another routine spat in the international community.

Now Beijing might be pondering a more aggressive move. CIA Director Bill Burns said over the weekend that China may be considering sending lethal aid (that is, artillery shells and the like rather than military gear or supplies) to Russia to help Putin’s forces, who are still floundering about in a bloodbath of their own making. Providing shells without more launchers might not help Russia very much in the short term, but it would be a provocative move meant to signal to the West that the authoritarians can and will support each other in attacks against their neighbors—an issue important to Beijing as it continues to covet Taiwan.

Burns indicated that the Chinese had not yet made a decision, and that the U.S. was discussing the possibility in public as a way of trying to warn them off. The Biden administration has been extremely savvy about releasing intelligence, and this seems to be yet another strategic leak.

We know what you’re thinking, the Americans are saying to China. Don’t do it.

It is time, however, for more than warnings.

A year ago, I was one of the more cautious supporters of aid to Ukraine. In those first chaotic weeks, I was heartened to see Ukrainian forces repel the invaders, but I knew that Russia had significant reserves. I was in favor of sending weapons, but I was mindful of the dangers of escalation, and especially the possibility that advanced Western weapons flooding into Ukraine would help Putin recast the conflict as a war between Russia and NATO. I worried, too, that Putin’s evident emotional state, characterized by delusions and rage, would lead him to take stupid and reckless measures whose consequences he himself would later be unable to control.

I think these were (and are) reasonable concerns, but Russia has escalated the violence despite the West’s measured approach. Putin remains as stubbornly delusional as ever, and he is sending thousands more troops into battles that have already killed or wounded some 200,000 men. A year of pretenses is over: The Russians themselves now know—as does the world—that this is Putin’s personal war and not, as he has tried to frame it, a campaign against neo-Nazis or shadowy globalists or militant trans activists. The West, meanwhile, has fully embraced its role as “the arsenal of democracy,” as it did against the actual Nazis, and Western arms, powered by Ukrainian courage and nimble Ukrainian strategy, are defeating Putin’s armies of hapless conscripts, corrupt officers, and mercenary criminals.

Now it’s time for the West to escalate its assistance to Ukraine, in ways that will deter China and defeat Russia. For example, the U.S. and NATO do not yet have to send advanced fighter jets to Ukraine—but they can start training Ukrainian pilots to fly them. To Russia, such a policy would say that things are about to get much worse for Putin’s forces in the field; to China, it would say that our commitment to Ukraine and to preserving the international order we helped create is greater than Beijing’s commitment to Moscow. As the Washington Post writer Max Boot noted last month, the Chinese president has an interest in helping a fellow autocrat, but he is also “an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik” who “does not want to wind up on what could be the losing side.”

Putin thinks he can wear down the Ukrainians (and the West) through a protracted campaign of mass murder. The Biden administration has ably calibrated the Western response, and NATO has ruled out—as it should—any direct involvement of Western forces in this war. But if Putin remains unmoved and unwilling to stop, then the only answer is to increase the costs of his madness by sending more tanks, more artillery, more money, more aid of every kind. (We could also reopen the issue of whether we should provide longer-range systems, including the Army’s tactical missile system, the ATACMs.)

China must be warned away from assisting Russia, because so much more than the freedom of Ukraine is at stake in this war. Chinese aid would be yet another sign that the authoritarians intend to rewrite the rules—or at least the few left—that govern the international system of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation constructed while the wreckage of World War II was still smoldering. Many Europeans, who are closer to the misery Russia is inflicting on Ukraine, understand this better than Americans do.

Americans, for their part, need to think very hard about what happens if Russia wins—especially with an assist from the Chinese. They will be living in a North American redoubt, while more and more of the world around them will learn to accommodate new rules coming from Beijing and Moscow. The freedom of movement Americans take for granted—of goods, people, money, and even ideas—would shrink, limited by the growing power of the world’s two large dictatorial regimes and their minor satraps.

Some Americans may wonder why we should risk even more tension with Russia. The fact of the matter is that we no longer have a relationship with Russia worth preserving. We do have a common interest—as we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War—in avoiding a nuclear conflict. We managed to agree on that interest while contesting hot spots around the globe for a half century, and we can do it again.

Americans who ask “What does any of this mean to me?” will find out just how much it means to them when things they want—or need—are provided only through the largesse and with the permission of their enemies. We knew this during the Cold War, and we must learn it again. We should ignore the pusillanimous Putinistas among the right-wing media. Instead, the United States and its allies must make the case, every day, for Ukrainian victory—and send the Ukrainians what they need to get the job done.

Related:

How China is using Vladimir Putin The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.

Today’s News

Britain and the European Union agreed to a deal that would end the dispute over post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. Severe thunderstorms in the central U.S. caused tornadoes and extreme winds in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, injuring more than a dozen residents and leaving thousands without power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that gives him control over Disney World’s self-governing district.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson shares the seven questions about AI that he can’t stop asking himself. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal examines what air travel reveals about humans.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job

By Ryan Bradley

I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’ll be leaving you with my Atlantic colleagues here at the Daily for the rest of the week while I do some traveling. One of the places I am headed is Salem, Massachusetts, where I’ll be giving a talk. I have a sentimental attachment to the city because my Uncle Steve, whom I wrote about here, ran a diner there, Dot and Ray’s, that was a local institution for decades. (I think Dot and Ray were the previous owners.) For me, not only was Salem in the 1960s and ’70s a cool town with an amusement park; it meant all the fried chicken and clams and hamburgers and ice cream I could eat. To visit Uncle Steve and Aunt Virginia was always an epic outing, especially because they got all the Boston TV stations with stuff like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on them.

But if you’re visiting New England and looking for places outside of the usual Boston tourist spots, you should visit the Witch City (not that there’s anything wrong with walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, which every American should do if the chance arises). Yes, the Salem Witch Trials kitsch can be a bit much, but the trials were an important part of American history, and the house where they took place is still there, along with a museum. There’s much more to Salem, however, including a fine maritime and cultural museum and a seaport. (And don’t forget the clams.)

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The fate of President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program that would impact scores of borrowers from a wide array of colleges and socioeconomic backgrounds lies in the hands of nine relatively wealthy people who graduated from a short list of elite private schools.

Can US president Joe Biden forgive $430 billion worth of student loans? That’s a question the Supreme Court will attempt to answer.

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President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month featured a hefty dose of good old-fashioned economic populism. Biden called out the rich for cheating on taxes, and big companies for not paying any taxes at all. He attacked Big Pharma for jacking up drug prices. And he took aim at one of progressives’ bêtes noires: stock buybacks.

Biden attacked companies for spending money on buybacks rather than investing in their operations, and called on Congress to quadruple the tax on such stock repurchases—a tax first put in place by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. And on February 14, Senate Democrats Sherrod Brown and Ron Wyden introduced a bill that would do exactly that.

The proposed tax would raise some revenue, and make more similar the taxation treatment of buybacks and dividends. But that’s not really the point of the tax. Its goal is to discourage corporations from doing something that many Democrats now see as useless at best and downright harmful at worst.

Buybacks, according to their critics, are a form of stock-market manipulation designed purely to make corporate executives rich. Such self-dealing, critics say, is responsible for wage stagnation, corporate underinvestment, and sluggish economic growth. When Southwest Airlines’ scheduling software crashed recently, leading to a flood of cancellations, buybacks were cited as one of the culprits. And after the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, buybacks were again blamed—in this case, for the company stinting on safety upgrades. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer captured the prevailing sentiment last August, when he called buybacks “despicable.”

[Derek Thompson: The economy is still very, very weird]

On the face of it, this hatred of buybacks is a little surprising. It’s a fairly mundane thing for a company, public or private, to buy back its stock when it thinks the shares are undervalued (the quintessential rationale for buybacks). Although buybacks do return capital to shareholders, the same is true of dividends—yet you rarely, if ever, hear politicians blasting dividend payments. (To be fair, Senator Bernie Sanders has probably criticized those too at some point.)

So why have buybacks become the object of such vitriol? A lot of it has to do with just how much money corporations are spending on them—more than $5 trillion over the past decade—and the fact that the volume of buybacks has risen dramatically in the past 20 years. Most of the attacks, however, rest not on these actualities but on myths about how buybacks work and what effect they have.

Take the argument—one much favored by Senator Elizabeth Warren—that unlike dividends, buybacks artificially boost the company’s share price, and that executives use them to dump stock. Buybacks, according to this argument, are a kind of sugar high, plumping up the stock price in the short run but weakening the company over the long haul. The problem with the argument is that this effect is negligible: Although it’s true that buybacks do tend to create a short-term boost to stock prices, recent research suggests that they do so by less than a single percentage point.

More important, if buybacks were actually inflating a company’s stock price in the short term at the expense of its long-term well-being, then companies that engage in big buybacks would underperform the market in the long run. The opposite is true: Studies have shown that, on average, companies that buy back their stock beat the market in the long term. This suggests that companies generally do a good job of buying their stock when it’s undervalued. (It also means that executives who choose to dump shares during buybacks are usually giving up sizable future gains.)

[Annie Lowrey: The economy is improving in three major ways]

The critics also argue that companies, in spending so much money on buybacks, are foregoing worthwhile investment opportunities and underinvesting. They might point to the fact that the percentage of corporate revenue dedicated to traditional capital expenditures, such as physical plant and equipment, has dropped steadily over the years, even as spending on buybacks has risen. But this phenomenon is in large part due to the shift in the U.S. economy away from such industries as manufacturing and mining, and the rising domination of the economy by less capital-intensive industries. If, instead, you look at traditional investment plus spending on “intangibles” such as intellectual property and research and development, there’s no sign of a steep drop-off.

Undoubtedly true is that, in some cases, buybacks are used by unimaginative CEOs who can’t think of anything better to do with surplus cash. Also true is that buybacks are not an inherently good strategy; many of them prove to be bad investments because the company’s stock is overvalued. But if corporations are regularly missing out on solid investment opportunities, you can’t see it in their results: Corporate profits and earnings growth have been high in recent years. That suggests that if companies are buying back stock, it’s mostly because they think more profitable investments aren’t available.

Take, for instance, the example that Biden cited in his State of the Union address: oil companies. Biden criticized “Big Oil” for spending a chunk of the huge profits it earned in 2022 on buybacks rather than investing more in oil production. But it’s not surprising that oil companies view big new investments in oil production as risky, given the Biden administration’s push for a shift in U.S. energy consumption to greener sources, and given the likelihood of tougher regulations on drilling and fracking—perhaps even the introduction of carbon pricing—to help tackle climate change. In that light, the appeal of simply returning money to shareholders is easy to see.

What about workers’ pay? Buyback critics suggest that if corporations can’t buy back stock, they’ll be more inclined to improve wages. But this argument is even more implausible than the one about investment. Taxing buybacks, even at punitive rates, doesn’t create pressure on companies to pay workers more: Even if companies are deterred from buying back their stock, it does not follow that they’re going to choose to reduce their profits. What they’ll do instead is increase dividends, spend money on acquisitions, or, more likely, stockpile the cash.

[James Surowiecki: The method in the markets’ madness]

Just look at Apple, the company that’s spent the most on buybacks in recent years. In 2017, before it accelerated its program of buying back stock, Apple had $285 billion in cash on its balance sheet. That would be the most likely result if companies stopped buying back stock: not higher wages but much bigger corporate bank accounts. The economy does not obviously benefit from having corporations hold piles of cash rather than return some of it to shareholders (who typically recycle it into other investments).

Why progressives have seized on buybacks as a symbol of overweening corporate power is not hard to understand. But to hold buybacks responsible for problems they have little to do with—problems that getting rid of them would do nothing to solve—does not make sense. If you want corporations to raise wages, you need to strengthen labor unions, raise minimum wages, and run tighter labor markets. If you want Southwest Airlines to upgrade its software, you need rules that punish airlines for mass cancellations caused by system failures. If you want Norfolk Southern to spend more on safety, you need tougher safety regulations.

Even if you think corporate America is sick, curbing buybacks treats something that’s barely a symptom. It does nothing to tackle the disease.

Millions of student loan borrowers could see up to $20,000 of their debt canceled depending on the outcome of Tuesday's US Supreme Court hearing on President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program.

Joe Biden seems like he’s running again, God love him.

He will most likely make this official in the next couple of months, and with the support of nearly every elected Democrat in range of a microphone. That is how things are typically done in Washington: The White House shall make you primary-proof. The gods of groupthink have decreed as much.

Unless some freethinking Democrat comes along and chooses to ignore the groupthink.

In private, of course, many elected Democrats say Biden is too old to run again and that they wish he’d step away—which aligns with what large majorities of Democrats and independents have been telling pollsters for months. The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

Yes, this would be a radical move, and would anger a bunch of Democrats inside the various power terrariums of D.C., starting with the biggest one of all, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There would be immediate blowback from donors, the Democratic National Committee, and other party institutions. But do it anyway. Preferably before Biden makes his final decision, while there’s an opening. If approached deftly, the gambit could benefit the president, the party, and even the challenger’s own standing, win or lose.

[David A. Graham: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

There has to  be one good Challenger X out there from the party’s supposed “deep bench,” right? Someone who is compelling, formidable, and younger than, say, 65. Someone who is not Marianne Williamson. Someone who would be unfailingly gracious to Biden and reverential of his career—even while trying to end it.

Before we start tossing out names, let’s establish a big to be sure. To be sure, primaries can be very bad for presidents seeking reelection. There is good reason no incumbent has been subjected to a serious intraparty challenge in more than three decades—not since the Republican Pat Buchanan launched a populist incursion against President George H. W. Bush in 1992. A dozen years earlier, President Jimmy Carter had endured an acrid primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Both Carter and Bush managed to hold off their challengers, but they came away battered and wound up losing their general elections.

Biden, however, is a special case, for two reasons. The first concerns the disconnect between how affectionately most Democrats view him versus their desire to move on from him. Recent surveys show that 60 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. These spigots of cold water in the polls have been accompanied by icy buckets of liberal commentary and chilly assessments from (mostly) anonymous elected Democrats in the press. By contrast, large majorities of Republicans wanted Donald Trump to seek reelection in 2020, and an overwhelming consensus of Democrats wanted Barack Obama to run again in 2012. Same with Republicans and George W. Bush in 2004, and Democrats and Bill Clinton in 1996.

Why should Biden not enjoy the same coronation? He’s done a good job in the eyes of the people who voted for him in 2020. His party overperformed in the midterms. He seems to be humming along fine—feisty State of the Union here, muscular visit to Ukraine there, and endless jokers to the right. He has achieved important things, has clearly enjoyed the gig, and appears quite eager for more. The difference in Biden’s case, of course, goes directly to the second reason for his special predicament. It begins with an 8.

Allow me to point out, as if you don’t already know this, that Biden is old. He is 80 now, will be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025, and will hit 86 if he makes it all the way through a second term. He was born during the Roosevelt administration (Franklin, not Teddy, but still).

The Delaware Corvette has flipped through the odometer a time or two. I’ve pointed this out before, in this publication. The White House did not like that story. But it was true then, and it’s truer now—by eight months, and a lot more Democrats are getting a lot more anxious.

“This is not a knock on Joe Biden, just a wish for competition,” says Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, one of a tiny number of elected Democrats who have expressed on-the-record trepidation about Biden’s plans. Phillips couches the absurdity of this in terms of free enterprise. “In the business world, if the dominant brand in a category had favorability ratings like the current president does, you would see a number of established brands jump into that category,” Phillips told me. “Believe me, there are literally hundreds in Congress who would say the same thing,” he said. “But they simply won’t fucking say a word.”

[Read: Why Biden shouldn’t run in 2024]

Here’s the deal, as Biden would say. No one wants to be accused of messing around with established practices when the alternative—very possibly Donald Trump—is so terrifying. But just as Trump has intimidated so many Republicans into submission, he also has paralyzed Democrats into extreme risk aversion. This has fostered an unhealthy capitulation to musty assumptions. And if you believe groupthink can’t be horribly wrong, I’ve got some weapons of mass destruction to show you in Iraq, not to mention a Black man who will never be elected president and, for that matter, a reality-TV star who won’t either.

The big riddle is: Who? Let’s assess an (extremely) hypothetical primary field. First, eliminate Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and any other member of Biden’s administration from consideration. Such an uprising against the boss would represent an irreparably disloyal and unseemly act and simply would not happen. Let’s also eliminate Senator Bernie Sanders from consideration, because been there, done that (twice), and he’s actually Biden’s senior by a year.

Otherwise, indulge me in a bit of mentioning. Here is a hodgepodge of possible primary nuisances: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey; Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; California Governor Gavin Newsom; Maryland Governor Wes Moore. This is a noncomprehensive list.

Let’s take the first Challenger X on the list, the newly reelected Whitmer, who, for the record, says she will not be running in 2024, regardless of what Biden does. She declared as much after her double-digit crushing of Republican Tudor Dixon in November. “Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says she is committed to a full second term,” reads the report in Bridge Michigan, the local publication to which she revealed her plans. The article refers to the 46th president as “aging Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.”

What might it look like if Whitmer did make a run at said “aging Democratic incumbent”? The how dare you types would be unpleasantly aroused. Words like ingrate, disloyal, and opportunist would be hurled in her face. She would be blamed for creating a turbulent situation for the self-styled “party of grown-ups,” and at a time when they can credibly portray Republicans as an irresponsible brigade of nutbags, cranks, and chaos agents. Whitmer would also, implicitly, be accused of not “waiting her turn.” Just as Obama was in 2008, when he opted to skip the line and sought the Democratic nomination, even though the groupthink memo at the time stipulated that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn.

But perhaps the pushback would not be as rough as Challenger X expected. In all likelihood, it would occur mostly in private or anonymously. Biden would be somewhat obliged to project calm and indifference in public. “The more the merrier,” the president and his surrogates would say through tight smiles. Nobody would benefit from any appearance of resentment.

[David A. Graham: The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden]

Challenger X could earn goodwill by campaigning with class and expressing unrelenting gratitude to Biden. She could simply nod and shrug in response to the various admonitions. Emphasize her own credentials and the grave threat posed by Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or any other Republican. Say repeatedly that she would do whatever was necessary to help and support the president if primary voters nominated him again.

For any Challenger X, the main selling point would fall into the general classification of representing “new blood,” a “fresh start,” or some such. These terms would serve as polite stand-ins for the age issue rather than smears about Biden’s mental capacity. Another thematic argument would involve popular American ideals such as “choice” and “freedom.” As in: Democrats deserve a “choice” and should enjoy the “freedom” to vote for someone other than the oldest president in history—the guy well over half of you don’t want to run.

Challenger X would almost certainly receive tons of press coverage—probably good coverage, too, given that the media are predisposed to favor maverick-y candidates who inject unforeseen conflict into the process. When the voting starts, maybe this upstart would overperform—grabbing 35 percent or so in the early states, say. Maybe they wouldn’t surpass Biden, but could still reap the good coverage, gracefully drop out, and gain an immediate advantage for 2028. Or maybe Biden would take the hint, step away on his own, and let Democrats get on with picking their next class of national leaders. To some degree, the party has been putting this off since Obama was elected.

Quite obviously, Democrats today have a strong craving for someone other than the sitting president. (Also obvious: That someone is not the current vice president.) Many voters viewed Biden’s candidacy in 2020 as a one-term proposition. He suggested as much. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said nearly three years ago at a campaign event in Michigan, where he appeared with Harris, Booker, and Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

Some mischief-maker should give Democrats a path to that future starting now. Voters bought the bridge in 2020. But when does it become a bridge too far?

Democrat Jennifer McClellan easily won the special election for Virginia's 4th Congressional District last week. The fact that a Democrat comfortably retained a Democratic seat in a district President Joe Biden would have won under its new lines by 36 points in 2020 is not surprising.

Chief diplomatic adviser to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ihor Zhovkva responds after US President Joe Biden said he will not give Ukraine F-16 fighter jets right now.