One of the most important fruits of a balanced budget is that the federal government can now engage in brainier budgeting, making public investments that will increase future economic growth. And it does not take a lot of brainpower to realize that one public investment we ignore at our peril is in basic research.

Basic scientific research is the mother's milk of innovation, which economists tell us is the most important factor fueling economic growth in the Information Age. By boosting productivity, innovation raises real incomes without spurring inflation. Indeed, relatively low productivity growth (averaging 1.3 percent annually since 1973 as opposed to 3.1 percent per year between 1947 and 1973) is the major culprit in the wage stagnation that has prevailed for most middle-income families in good times and bad. With productivity growth dropping to an annual level of 0.2 percent during the first quarter of this year, fears are growing that the current boom will be hard to sustain.

If government has a huge stake in promoting innovation, it also plays a huge role in financing basic research, because the commercial "payoff" is often too far down the road and too hard to "corner" to make it profitable for private investors. But at a time when it should be rising, government support for non-defense research and development has been steadily dropping, from about 1 percent of gross domestic product in the 1960s to less than half of that number today. The decline is actually gaining steam, with federal investments shrinking at an average annual rate in constant dollars of 2.6 percent between 1987 and 1995.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Phil Gramm (R-TX), Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) think it's time to turn that trend around and rebuild public investment in basic research. The National Research Investment Act of 1998, S. 1305, would double federal expenditures for basic scientific, medical, and engineering research over a 10-year period, reaching an aggregate level of $68 billion in 2008. All the additional investment would be in "pre-competitive" stages of research: Once an innovation reached the stage when it would become profitable for private-sector applications, federal support would end. Since each dollar of federal basic research is estimated to leverage three dollars of private investment, this initiative could create a virtual explosion of new innovations, and arguably a big boost in productivity, real incomes, stable economic growth, and U.S. economic leadership.

These senators introduced S. 1305 in part to cast a spotlight on the Senate-passed FY 1999 federal budget resolution, which actually reduces federal investment in non-defense R&D by more than $3.5 billion over five years.

How to pay for the higher investments called for in S. 1305? As always, Congress should look at the tens of billions of dollars currently spent each year on industry spending subsidies and tax breaks that do not contribute to innovation or reflect an appropriate government role in the economy. If that's not enough, perhaps Congress should rethink its decision to boost federal highway spending by 42 percent over the next five years -- a far less productive form of public investment -- and drop a few more coins into the rattling tin cup of America's scientists and researchers, who feed the golden goose that makes sustained economic growth possible in the first place.