$10k universal forgiveness would cost $370 billion. Biden's 10k/20k forgiveness plan with an income cap would be roughly the same at $360 billion.
It would be about $40 billion less than the cumulative spending on TANF over the last 20 years.
Or another way to look at it, we could have expanded the child tax credit for like 5 years.
In case you wondered, WIC is Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, it provides stuff like infant formula, health screening, and other aid to low income mothers and infants.
Pell is for Pell grants for low income students to attend university.
A lot of the time, people who are upset about the debt forgiveness for student loans is just people projecting their stereotypes about college onto the forgiveness.
For instance, if we were to forgive the debt for nurses on their student loans, there wouldn't be as much push-back, even some support. On the other hand, a lot of the opponents frame the forgiveness as giving unemployed general studies students a major break, this, despite representing a tiny amount of borrowers and nurses being a top degree of choice for women.
Overall, the arguments are not cohesive. They point out the regressivity of the forgiveness in the same sentence as saying it is going to underemployed, underwater basket weaving majors.