Ben Bernanke - dubbed Helicopter Ben by some commentators for his now-famous advocacy of Milton Friedman's "helicopter drops" of money into the economy - has failed to live up to his promise. Not that I wished he had, but what Bernanke, Congress and the Presidents have done is much worse than dropping cash from helicopters to supposedly stimulate the economy. The New York Times puts the total bailout spending at about $9,000,000,000,000 (nine trillion). If there are 100 million households in the United States, as a back-of-the-envelope estimate, that is $90,000 per household. I propose, in the place of these obscene bailouts of Wall Street cronies, that the government have held a one-off Stimulus Lottery. This is no worse than Lord Keynes' proposal that the government bury jars of cash. If the goal really is to stimulate the economy from the "demand-side" as the economically illiterate like to say, then surely this would do it. We could hold a lottery with ...