I think that one component of this discussion not yet mentioned-- and perhaps largely invisible to most people, both in and out of the STEM occupations is that there has been a shift over the past 30 years in how research is funded.
Yes, government granting has always funded, and continues to fund, what it sees as "basic" (as opposed to 'applied') research. The understanding being that 'applied' research has generally got commercial applications which are obvious (at least to the people who are making decisions it should be) and will have commercial/financial incentives to drive them. So there was, up until the late 1990's, a gentleman's agreement of sorts that understood that there was this firewall between the academy and the military/govt. and private industry. Most people in science stayed (for their careers) on one side or the other-- and this is still mostly true, at least in those classic "lab" (ha ha... how quaint, by the way) disciplines.
The problem here is exactly the same one driving very high rates of unemployment in recent college grads. Companies have shifted costs away from themselves to such a degree that they are not INTERESTED in doing "science" research anymore. Only development of already-fairly mature science.
The unemployment rate was 4.7% as recently as November 2007
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 , so a long-term shift in corporate attitudes is unlikely to be the main reason for high current unemployment.
Arguably the most famous corporate research lab, Bell Labs, was funded by AT&T when it had an effective monopoly on phone service. When companies are in a more competitive environment, which I think is better overall for the nation's standard of living (remember when long-distance phone calls cost serious money?), they have less freedom to make investments in fundamental research that have negative expected value for their shareholders.
