The Facts.

an expensive program by which the federal government paid banks and other private lenders to provide federally backed loans to students who chose this route. In this program, if students defaulted on their loans, the banks got paid by the government anyway.

President Obama instead pushed for the Education Department, which already provides student assistance, to grant all federally backed loans. To get rid of the middlemen, in other words.

The result: Billions of dollars in subsidies to private lenders saved, more than $60 billion over the next decade. It’s the biggest change in the government’s efforts to help students pay for college since they began decades ago.

It’s hard to logically argue against the reform, but a lot of legislators and folks in the loan industry did anyway.

The debate over whether to do this got heated; industry leaders said jobs would be lost.

The debate got silly; some opponents argued that taking this step would “nationalize” the student loan program, conveniently forgetting that the government already pays for it so, by definition, it already IS a government program.

So that $60B was the "small subsidy" you were talking about?