Barack Obama advocates government spending to boost U.S. competitiveness. He spoke on economic issues in June.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and CORNELIA DEAN

For decades, the United States dominated the global technological revolution. Today, that dominance is eroding. The nation’s high-technology balance of trade - the annual gap between exports and imports - is expected to be the largest ever this year, approaching $60 billion.
Both presidential candidates have made detailed arguments on how the nation can sharpen its competitive edge. Yet their visions are strikingly different. They diverge mainly on the appropriate role for the federal government.
Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, seeks to encourage innovation by cutting corporate taxes and ending what he calls “burdensome regulations” that he says inhibit corporate investment.
Senator Barack Obama , the Democratic nominee, looks to the federal government to finance science, math and engineering education, as well as research that can produce valuable industrial applications.
At the request of The New York Times, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, estimated the annual costs of the plans and put Mr. Obama’s at $85.6 billion and Mr. McCain’s at $78.8 billion, excluding his proposed reductions in corporate taxes.
“The pressures of an unfolding fiscal crisis make these priorities recede on the list of what politicians want to do,” said Robert Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995.
Mr. McCain became chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in 1997 and held the position until early 2005. Though often approving of business and deregulation, he could reverse course if the issue impinged on what he saw as national security concerns.
One initiative of his sought to restrict exports of certain high-tech goods. “It’s critical that safeguards are in place,” he said in 1998 at a hearing on missile and satellite exports to China.
Republicans later charged the Clinton administration with dangerous irresponsibility in allowing the Chinese to import high-performance computers. The Republican efforts helped tighten export regulations. But technology analysts faulted the attack as political and the new rules as unnecessary.
Domestically, the commerce committee sought over the years to spur things like Internet development, the private space industry and the commercial licensing of federally owned inventions. In 2005 Mr. McCain introduced a bill to limit heattrapping gases that also sought to spur the development of green technologies.
Later that year, the National Academies, the nation’s most eminent scientific and engineering organization, issued an influential report calling for an urgent effort to boost American competitiveness. It proposed, among other things, that the government increase the basic research budget by 10 percent a year for seven years; finance scholarships for math and science teaching careers and college-level study of science, math and engineering; and make broadband Internet access available nationwide at low cost.
In 2007 Mr. Obama joined other senators to introduce a bill that built on the report’s recommendations. He offered amendments intended to increase federal support of science education . The Senate passed the bill 88 to 8; Mr. McCain abstained. President Bush signed the bill into law, but Congress has yet to finance its programs, estimated to cost about $43 billion for the first three years.
In their campaign platforms, Mr. Mc- Cain and Mr. Obama advocate making research and development tax credits permanent. They would strengthen the position of presidential science adviser, they support human exploration of space, and they agree that access to broadband must be expanded.
But Mr. Obama proposes doubling federal financing for basic research in physics, life sciences, mathematics and engineering over 10 years. He promises to review export rules he calls outdated and sees as having “unduly hampered the competitiveness of the domestic aerospace industry.”
Mr. McCain says easing regulatory and tax burdens will encourage private spending on research. Even before the current economic crisis, he proposed freezing, at least initially, almost all discretionary federal spending - a budget category that includes federal research efforts.