When President Obama gave the State of the Union speech on Jan. 25, many in America were already tone-deaf to the proposals, including a large chunk of this campus. Coming into the address, I too was skeptical. I did not want a pep rally-like speech this year, but a detailed roadmap instead.

I was surprised when it came to the segment on science funding, and I found that Obama and I share common ground.

In the past 60 years, our nation’s economy has grown from being an equal to many of the pre-war European powers to a stalwart that the rest of the world watches with envy. What most of this paper’s readers do not know is that there was a key turning point that fueled that intense growth and has been largely ignored in the history books.

While our high school and college textbooks regularly mention the reparations required in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI, reparations were also required in the Potsdam Agreement. Unlike their predecessors, the Allied leaders knew better than to require a dollar amount from a ravaged economy, so the U.S. received payment in German patents and industrial assets instead.

It was during this time that we received people like Wernher von Braun to run the space program, which allowed us to have our “Sputnik Moment” and reach the moon.

Congressional authorization of research dollars in the 1950s and 1960s allowed us to leap ahead of everyone else in developing the newest technologies that better improve our quality of life. Today, our national laboratories open the door to new ideas and products daily with discoveries that are published in research journals and eventually make their way to the U.S. Patent Office.

For the past three generations, we have enjoyed this dominance in innovation, but today there are more players that have joined the competition, notably the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, China and India). As these developing economies become markets for research dollars, our research efforts and funding have stayed stagnant. In fact, the NSF, NASA and the NIH receive only a sliver of the overall government spending pie, and the allocations hardly increase enough to match inflation.

While the past few years have seen additional increases, the amount of funding is still lacking to say the least. If we do not realize the importance of funding fundamental science and its applications, we will not only lose our position as the R&D center of the world, but will lose the business associated with the patents that would have been generated.

Fortunately, it does not have to be this way, as our universities are still the world’s top centers for discovery. They give us a unique opportunity to innovate our way into the future.

With a few simple changes, it will be possible for us to maintain our status as scientific pioneers and keep our economic dominance.

First, we must realize that while our deficit is at an unsustainable level and must be tackled, there is a difference between frivolous, unnecessary spending and investment capital. A government riddled with duplicative programs personifies the very notion of frivolous spending, not to mention the $15.9 billion that goes to “pork-barrel” spending — appropriations that the very politicians who passed them into law now suddenly detest.

In fact, reallocating the pork money to any of the research arms would translate to nearly a 50 percent increase in the NIH budget, a 100 percent increase in the NASA budget, and a 200 percent increase in the NSF budget, all while being completely deficit neutral.

Considering these dollars actually lead to new products that could be produced in the U.S., I find this to be a much greater use of money than, say, installing precast concrete toilets in a Montana national forest (Note: the government actually did that).

Secondly, we need to face the fact that we are not producing enough domestic engineers and scientists, and that previous efforts to get people into the STEM fields have not been wildly successful. Even though the U.S. still churns out more doctorates and master’s degrees than ever before, many of these graduates are foreign students whose visas are revoked as soon as they complete commencement, in effect giving those individuals’ knowledge to our international competitors.

This must change if we are to innovate the future technologies that we will need. Our government immigration authorities should issue a solemn promise that upon conferral of a student’s Ph.D., there will automatically be a green card waiting for them and a fast track to citizenship.

While this will not prevent all foreign graduates from leaving, it will allow those who wish to stay to contribute to the US’s pool of knowledge.

But, as usual, there are those who are against such measures for reasons of “big government,” being unconstitutional, or just being plain obstructionism.

Consider these arguments against just one of the many examples of how the federal government’s funding of science has greatly improved our lives. In 1994, the NSF awarded a grant to Stanford University to investigate new ways to search for content on the web using an algorithm that gave a webpage a rank and broadcast those results onto a single list. That research grant was wildly successful, and led one foreign student from the former Soviet Union to live the American Dream. In fact, you might have taken advantage of that algorithm to find this column.

The researcher’s name? Sergey Brin. The company? Google.

Gregory Poole is a graduate student in metallurgical engineering. His column runs biweekly on Wednesdays.