The economic impact of these emerging markets can be tremendous. Eight percent of today’s U.S. economy stems from industries like wireless communications, satellite television, and data hosting services that barely existed twenty years ago. And the winners in these emerging fields can go on to become huge enterprises. Forty-two of the Fortune 50 firms have gotten their start in new industries. Think Google – or even ExxonMobil. Both started out this way.

Conservatives frequently argue that the private sector will innovate better if it can simply operate free of government interference. But don’t be fooled: The private sector is not about to pick up this kind of slack. Basic research offers long-term, uncertain rewards, and the unpredictable fruits of the work may lie outside a company’s areas of strategic interest. Cumulatively across the entire economy, the private sector’s basic research budget is about $9 billion, a number that has scarcely grown in twenty years and which is half of what the country spends on pet food. Decades ago, private institutions like AT&T’s Bell Labs could churn out inventions like the transistor. Companies have long since slashed those efforts, in no small part because shareholders are not interested in such fickle, long-term ventures.

Rhetorically, President Obama has said the right things about innovation: He has frequently, and accurately, called spending on research a form of “investment.” Yet in his 2012 budget proposal, he called for providing only $900 million more to the National Science Foundation, which supports much of the basic research in physics, chemistry and other non-healthcare related fields. It’s better than nothing, for sure, but it pales when compared to what government spends to develop technologies closer to commercialization such as electric car batteries and pharmaceuticals. (Government spending on health research has been the exception to the flat-lining of science funding. Unfortunately, the resulting innovations have tended to stay confined to the health care sector, without much spillover to the rest of the economy.)

Of course, a big reason Obama and his allies haven’t pushed for even more spending is that the political resistance is so strong. The House Republicans’ recent attempt to cut $60 billion from the remainder of this fiscal year would have generated $350 million of the savings through cuts to the NSF. The relatively small savings those cuts would generate now could forgo millions of future jobs and billions in long-term tax revenues. The proposal was stunningly short-sighted for a party that claims to be looking out for the future.