It's not just economics. The key to excellence in science is to attract the best, keep the best, and give them what they need to do their best.
Researchers start out as grad-students, and the U.S. is a lot less friendly to foreign students than it used to be. Whether it's increased trouble with permits or being treated like terrorists by the TSA, fewer foreign grad students are staying in the U.S.. Many students considering a move to the U.S. are dissuaded after just one conference on U.S. soil! Overly nationalistic individuals from other countries can take some joy in this since it means better minds for their own nations, but science is a global endeavor and what lessens one nation lessens us all!
Attracting the best, keeping the best, and giving them what they need is economics.
If we don't have a sputnik moment and reverse this trend in the next decade or two, I suspect that in 50 years we'll find ourselves wondering why the next (multi)-trillion-dollar-a-year industry and its silicon valley weren't located in the USA. By then it will be too late.
That's common in most countries these days with very few exceptions. What few post-doc positions exist are viewed as a transitory positions and aren't very well paid (considering the qualifications required). If you want to do pure research without moving around the world constantly you can just forget about it! Either you get on the tenure-track or you go into industry and figure out how to steal money on the stock-exchange or make people click on banner-ads. Unfortunately, there just aren't that many tenured positions available.
You're probably a technocrat. I'm one too. I firmly believe the U.S. would be far better off if they shut down the NSA entirely and sank those billions into pure, curiosity driven research. Unfortunately, we are a tiny, tiny minority. Most people are very risk-averse and would rather guard a hovel than build a mansion!
Technocrat in the sense that I want to abolish democracy and have the government run by smart science people in the interest of smart science people?
No, I'm not. Bad Things start happening when you take self-governance away from people.
EDIT: But that dodges the point! How can people have the balls to complain about too little science being done while making life a miserable shlep for those of us who actually choose to do science?
I basically don't see a way to have a well-run country and avoid democracy.
A well-run country requires mature and capable people. People cannot really be mature and capable without participating responsibly in the world around them, including being able to make mistakes. It seems to me like people have to be able to participate in government, or they eventually get degraded into a mad, stupid rabble. The mad, stupid rabble then topple whatever oligarchical government they have and their country collapses from an inegalitarian oligarchical shithole into an utterly insane and incompetent shithole.
Certainly I think that it would be better to have a form of government that can quickly and rationally translate voters' expressed policy preferences into consequences. Problem is, existing systems are bad enough at even letting voters express policy preferences, let alone imposing the consequences quickly and thoroughly enough that voters start learning how to vote!
And yeah, you could try to separate the "brain" and "heart" functions of voting, by having voters vote on ideological/moral preferences and then letting them be translated into policies by a technocratic government. That's what the traditional notion of a democratic republic (and social democracy, and really much of Western democracy) actually tries to do. Problem is, that too has demonstrably led to a somewhat-more-benign form of oligarchy when implemented, albeit one in which some of the oligarchs are reasonably benevolent and it ends up being the politically degraded voters who ruin the country by making bad value decisions (like the Tea Party!) for which they are never held responsible.
And that doesn't even start into the problems of malignant oligarchical elites in our current democratic republics, who have largely decided, "Voters are stupid, so I'm going to govern on the class interests of myself and my social peers!"
Researchers start out as grad-students, and the U.S. is a lot less friendly to foreign students than it used to be. Whether it's increased trouble with permits or being treated like terrorists by the TSA, fewer foreign grad students are staying in the U.S.. Many students considering a move to the U.S. are dissuaded after just one conference on U.S. soil! Overly nationalistic individuals from other countries can take some joy in this since it means better minds for their own nations, but science is a global endeavor and what lessens one nation lessens us all!