DES MOINES - How severe is Iowa's fiscal crisis?

Bad enough that Gov. Chet Culver has cut his own salary and will ask public employees to do the same.

Bad enough that he's embracing Republican cost-cutting proposals, such as selling the state vehicle fleet.

Culver cut state spending 10 percent, or $585 million, after the Revenue Estimating Council predicted state revenues will decline

8.4 percent, or $415 million, this year.

"It's all about priorities," Culver says. "I'm still confident that if we set appropriate priorities, we can minimize the impact cuts will have on essential services."

His across-the-board cuts are a blunt ax approach to budget-cutting that provides "some sort of positive political symbolism - everyone sharing the pain," says Donald Moynihan, associate director of the

La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It doesn't differentiate between programs that are essential and programs where resources are perhaps less necessary."

The cut will give state government the room it needs to find and implement big changes, Culver says.

Legislative Democrats have pitched in, collecting budget-cutting ideas at www.legis.state.ia.us/aspx/SurveyForm/Improving_StGvt/.

Both Democrats and Republicans had similar Web sites during the 2009 session. No one seems to recall any suggestion that became law.

Interest groups that regularly push tax and budget changes at the Capitol are wasting little time touting their big ideas.

"If your audience is very worried and you can craft your argument to match the worry, you might be successful in winning the change you seek," Moynihan says.

Few people are more critical of Culver or tooting the crisis-as-opportunity horn louder than Iowans for Tax Relief President Ed Failor Jr.

"When you're up to your armpits in alligators, you either have to drain the swamp and get away from the alligators, or you will be on the menu," Failor says.

The organization is offering suggestions to save as much as Culver's 10 percent cut, but protect priorities. Among the suggestions are eliminating the Department of Economic Development, merging the departments of Natural Resources and Agriculture and Land Stewardship, and eliminating income taxes as a way to attract businesses and jobs.

Across the ideological aisle, Peter Fisher with the Iowa Fiscal Partnership says the discussion has to be about more than cutting taxes. Fisher is calling for closing tax loopholes and eliminating tax credits that don't produce results. Tax credits to business have grown from $180 million to $421 million in just three years, he says. Iowa's lack of a combined reporting law leaves as much as $80 million in revenue uncollected from multistate corporations.

"Not only is that lost revenue, but it's unfair to Iowa businesses competing with those corporations," Fisher says.

Even though the ideas aren't new, they're likely to get a hearing, Iowa State University political scientist Matthew Potoski says. "Big changes are more possible in time of crisis than not, but I don't have a clear sense of whether the changes are better."