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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According to today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Thornburg Mortgage’s $11 billion loan portfolio has found a buyer:

Select Portfolio Servicing Inc., a Salt Lake City mortgage-servicing business owned by Credit Suisse Group (CS), won the auction for Thornburg’s portfolio with a winning bid of about $95 million, according to Joel Sher, the failed lender’s Chapter 11 trustee.

If this summary of the Better Business Bureau file on Select is accurate, the sale could be bad news for homeowners who took out loans with Thornburg, which before its bankruptcy last year had a pretty good reputation for customer service:

“Based on BBB files, this company has unsatisfactory record with the BBB due to unanswered and unresolved complaints.

“The BBB processed a total of 136 complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period. Of the total of 136 complaints closed in 36 months, 59 were closed in the last year.”

In an interview for SFR’s new cover story, “Born Poor,” Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles suggested that the government invest directly in individuals, perhaps by giving everyone a lump sum to use however they wish—say, $250,000.

“It sounds very radical,” Bowles says, “but it’s very consistent with economic ideas.”

It makes as least as much sense as giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street’s largest banks—some of which helped cause the recession—so that the banks can lend it back to taxpayers at outrageous interest rates.

SFR wondered what people would actually do with a cool quarter-mil, if it dropped in their laps. So, we asked.

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A couple dozen people showed up outside the Roundhouse this morning in support of a proposal by state Rep. Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, to move public deposits of the giant financial institutions that helped cause the financial crisis and subsequent recession.

Egolf’s proposal, House Bill 66, got some national play in the Huffington Post the other day.

“It’s not going to be Brian Egolf going around giving big bags of cash to [local] banks,” Egolf said, waving his arms as though he were wielding invisible moneybags, and drawing a laugh from the crowd.

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New Mexico Workforce Solutions Secretary Ken Ortiz today presented the latest on the state’s skyrocketing unemployment to the state House Committee on Labor & Human Resources.

Among the facts he laid out: Weekly jobless claims increased 500 percent between June 2008 and December 2009. There were approximately 12,000 New Mexicans claiming jobless benefits, according to Ortiz’ charts. Now there are approximately 60,000.

When question time came around, state Rep. Candy Spence Ezzell laid into Ortiz, first by complaining that she’d been unable to get through to him, or anyone at the department, despite repeated calls over a period of weeks.

But Ezzell wasn’t about to sympathize with the thousands of New Mexicans who routinely spend hours on the phone checking on the status of their jobless benefits. No, she was upset that the state wasn’t drug testing people collecting unemployment. Watch:

With her references to “caseworkers”–which are assigned to people on probation, or claiming certain types of welfare benefits, but not to people collecting unemployment insurance–Ezzell, for all her forcefulness, seemed unsure about how the system actually worked.

Ezzell was absent for the next section of the committee meeting. SFR asked Ortiz after his presentation if he got the impression that Ezzell knew what unemployment insurance was.

“No,” Ortiz said. “Did you?”