Government spending: is there anything it can't do?

I guess President Obama was in Boston yesterday at a fundraiser for the DCCC. His speech was boilerplate stuff: what a terrible economy we inherited, look how we turned it around, and we need to address the deficit but let's give all these schoolkids their own laptops.

This section, however, boggles the imagination:

We’re going to have to make an investment to make sure that research and development, the cutting-edge technologies that drive our economy, continue to happen right here in Boston. You go over to MIT, you go over to Harvard, and they’ll be the first ones to tell you if we don’t have federal research grants, a lot of the work we do is not going to happen. And if it’s not happening there, then all those biotech firms, all those medical advances aren’t going to be taking place here, or along Route 128.

I love Obama's credulity here: these colleges say that unless they get a big pile of taxpayer cash, it's back to the Middle Ages because this research is "not going to happen." (As the Church Lady would say: "How convenient!") Remember how Thomas Edison took that big federal grant from Rutherford B. Hayes to develop the light bulb? And Steve Jobs built Apple on the taxpayer's dime? Thank heaven for public funding to underwrite Jonas Salk's research on the polio vaccine. Otherwise, it might never have happened.