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Ed Failor, president of Iowans for Tax Relief, made some reasonable and important points in a statement the group issued last week.

“Instead of sending more Iowans to the unemployment line, Gov. Culver needs to implement a state employee pay reduction,” he wrote, and we agree.

The governor’s order to cut state spending 10 percent across the board would make sense only if all programs are equally vital and all departments equally efficient. That’s never the case. Good leadership means recognizing the successful, not just spreading the pain.

Failor wrote: “What Gov. Culver needs to do is to lower state worker wages. A 5 percent pay reduction would save taxpayers approximately $140 million, and should save 1,000 Iowa jobs.”

That’s still an easy way out, still an “across the board” approach, but we like the job-saving part. The last thing we should do at this point is put more people in the unemployment line.

Then, when the short-term crisis eases, we need to take the next step and get realistic about government salaries.

The Des Moines Register keeps a database of state salaries, and the numbers at the upper end are stunning. Once you get past the coaches, you’re into an amazingly long list of professors and associate professors being paid $300,000 or $400,000.

Gee, we thought people went into academics for the love of learning.

More important than the extremes is the average of those tens of thousands of salaries. Failor quotes statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics: “The average annual wages for Iowa private-sector workers is $35,256. In the state government sector, average annual wages are $51,688.”

Failor says the governor should “reopen the current State Employee Collective Bargaining Agreement.” Sounds like a good idea. If businesses need to refocus now and then, so does state government.