SFR’s current cover story on economic inequality has been bouncing around the econoblogosphere. It’s also getting some attention in the Roundhouse. Apparently, New Mexico Lt. Gov. candidate and state Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino just plugged the story in a budget hearing. That’s according to the New Mexico Independent’s liveblog.

Here’s a visual appendix to the story that lawmakers might find useful. SFR made the following color-coded charts using Internal Revenue Service data for the 2007 tax year. The first shows that New Mexico is a solidly working-class state, with only a sliver of the population claiming even moderate wealth.

Approximately 18,500 New Mexicans reported incomes over $200,000, versus 719,200 who reported making less than $50,000.

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An addendum to this week’s story on the sure-to-be-slow summer tourism season: Last week, SFR asked city of Santa Fe finance director David Millican what the projected 10 percent drop in hotel occupancy would translate to in terms of gross receipts tax revenue for the city.

Millican got back to us*, but too late to make the print edition. Here is his reply, in part:

We are predicting 9% drops in GRT generally and have not done a detailed study on tourism because tourist and non tourist information is lumped together in two major categories, Retail and Accomodations and Food…

In other words, it’s hard to say what a slow tourism season means for the city budget. More from Millican after the cut:

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Santa Fe’s share of state gross receipts tax revenues, a measure of local spending, fell 5.71 percent in January, according to city finance director David Millican.

That monthly drop would make the year-to-date decline 2.17 percent—lower still than the 1.8 percent decline reported in this week’s Indicators column, which used last month’s numbers.

(Sorry, folks: The newest GRT figures came out too late on Monday to make the paper.)

Asked if there was any good news, Millican said he’d heard anecdotal evidence that February was kinder to Santa Fe’s hoteliers than January, which was “awful.”