Al Franken has a video out informing borrowers that they may be contacted if they’re eligible for a cash payment from a wrongful foreclosure or the opportunity to refinance or get a principal reduction on their loans. It’s more of a public service announcement than anything. Meanwhile, Tammy Baldwin joined others in criticizing Wisc. Gov. Scott Walker for proposing to divert settlement funds to the state treasury.

Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Attorney General.

Austerity is a major issue abroad, particularly Europe, but it has more to do with the sclerotic economic pace in the US than most people realize. Republicans successfully got spending caps that will ratchet down the budget in years to come, and they’ve already effectively frozen it. But as Jared Bernstein and Krugman show, the bigger contribution to austerity comes from state and local budgets.

There is a depression going on in the public sector. When cops and firefighters and teachers and nurses lose their jobs, they lose purchasing power, the ability to hire private contractors or visit private businesses for the purchase of goods and services. Public employees don’t use a different currency; you cannot divorce them from the private sector.

California’s ambitious high speed rail program hit a snag yesterday when a peer review group recommended a halt to continued bond funding of the project until a long-term funding source can be secured.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 80,000 jobs in October, and the topline unemployment rate ticked down a notch to 9.0%. This is the seventh straight month that the unemployment rate has been between 9.0 and 9.2%, a period of stasis for the economy, a low-growth holding pattern. The private sector led the way with 104,000 jobs gained, as the depression in the public sector continued, with 24,000 jobs lost.

The Obama Administration approved cuts to California’s Medicaid program that will slash reimbursement rates and potentially cause providers to reject treatment for the program for the poor.

There’s the issue of trade. Now this starts unexceptionally. Romney supports the existing trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia (on this point, the President agrees). And he wants to finish off the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Obama also supports. He also wants to pursue a “Reagan Economic Zone,” which I assume is important because it has the word “Reagan” in it. But then he starts in on China.

Let’s briefly look at the numbers. A $300 billion scheme would amount to around 2% of total GDP, and that’s being charitable by saying that this would all be used up in one year. That would have an impact, but half of this would be supply-side solutions that haven’t inspired much confidence during the recession. The question of whether temporary tax cuts are spent is a good one to ask. Especially on the employer side; if minimum wage increases have no effect on jobs, then surely tax subsidies to make hiring cheaper wouldn’t either.

Though the recent deals on freezing discretionary non-security spending and 2011 appropriations and the debt limit didn’t reduce spending by a tremendous amount in the short-term, the accumulation of all of these deals, along with the fading out of stimulus measures from 2009 and 2010, has made fiscal policy contractionary, despite 9% unemployment.