The word “cuts” has been in the news a lot lately. Job cuts. Spending cuts. Yesterday Gov. Culver joined the chorus of suited governmental and corporate leaders stepping up to the podium to announce cuts —

$77 million worth of them, actually.

Among the items heading for the chopping block are the state’s hiring plans and, the largest item on the list, the new

$37 million state office building, which the governor intends to ask the Legislature to annul in January. There’s also $7 million worth of cuts to the state’s regents institutions, something the Board of Regents will have to work out the details of itself.

While $77 million may seem like a large number, it must be viewed within the context of the wider state budget. The $7 million cut the regents will be asked to deal with constitutes a mere 1 percent of their allotment. The entire package of cuts accounts for just over one-half of 1 percent of the state’s $6.1 billion budget, since we’re already past the halfway point of the fiscal year.

The state government’s response at this juncture — a state wracked by flood damage, a national economy that seems to plumb new lows on a weekly basis and a broad agricultural sector that has come crashing back to Earth lately — will be critical. Our neighbors to the east in Illinois have been dealing with the consequences of bad fiscal policy in their state for several years now, and we’d really rather not follow suit.

It’s not easy shaving the excess fat from government. Hard choices have to be made: workforce development or highway construction? Higher education or help for the homeless? It’s in moments like these that politicians and statesmen separate from each other — something that knows no party lines. The automatic spending increases Democrats were able to push through the Legislature in the last two sessions will have to end. The state’s rainy-day fund, which many politicians on both sides have stood vigilant guard over for years, will almost certainly have to be raided. Republicans in the Legislature may, ultimately, be forced to accept some state borrowing in order to make ends meet.

All that takes leadership. Maybe it means the Gov. Culver giving up his salary, Detroit-automaker-style. Maybe it means holding sessions of the Legislature without turning the thermostat up. Those may largely be symbolic gestures, but those are the things that mean something to the average voter-on-the-street, who didn’t get a pay raise and heats his house with space heaters.

Leadership cannot afford to be an anomaly in these hard times. Here’s hoping Iowans can come to expect wise choices from their leaders.