Now that the Bernie Sanders candidacy has effectively ended, it's time to take on some of the measures he advocated. The main need is for US spending to increase to get the economy out of its funk. The Fed's various quantitative easing and interest rate fiddles have failed to get spending up. Households are still failing to shop till they drop, while the corporate sector is using cheap borrowed money and debt vehicles to fund moves which do not help the overall economy. This includes funding mergers and acquisitions, often piled up on each other to generate what looks like growth for a company but is nothing of the sort. Valeant (VRX) is one but there are plenty of others in tech, medical devices, eateries, funding cheaply stock buybacks, executive perks, and even dividends

What we need, to quote Ben Bernanke and before him Milton Friedman, is “helicopter money”, a way to increase spending by the hoi polloi. The idea of dropping cash from the sky is, of course, a fantasy, but it is what our central bank should be doing, in the opinion of experts, who by the way are not from the left wing like Bernie. The Fed can intervene even if Congress stupidly blocks deficit spending out of an exaggerated fear of inflation resulting from “money-printing”.

Among the programs Bernie advocated are several that would help get cash into the hands likeliest to spend spend it. Start with student loans. As a relative of a young pediatrician named Rebecca, I know first-hand what kind of debt is incurred to go to medical school. Other courses of study are shorter but in the present era also very costly. Long term they may help the former students and the economy overall, but short-term the ex-students suffer.

Another set of urgent needs involves America's creaky and broken down infrastructure, everything from hospital or schools to bridges and highways, public transport systems and railways, water and sewage works, dams, solar power stations, airports, bigger jails, holding sites and orphanages for illegal immigrants, a wall across the Rio Grande paid for by Uncle Sam, parks, canals, whatever.

If abortion clinics are required to have hospital facilities then the government should pay to upgrade them, particularly given the risk of babies born with diminished cranial capacity after a pregnant woman was stung by a Zika-virus mosquito.

The spending should begin by our government but there is no reason why private sector arrangements cannot cover part of the cost and be recuperated for investors. The helicopter has to land eventually, remember.

I also think Hillary Clinton has a few smart ideas on early childhood education (shares of Head Start!) and enrichment programs for older children. Leave for new mothers (and fathers) could be funded. More help paying for Obamacare would probably improve the nation's welfare.

With the impetus from the money suddenly in hand and the earnings of all those new construction projects, the economy will take off. Remember that the idea doesn't come from Keynesians and lefties but from a Nobel Prize winning economic expert on the Great Depression who was firmly on the far right of the Republican Party.