The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel wrote last week that “American people, businesses and government don’t save enough.” Citing the Commerce Department’s official U.S. personal savings rate, 0.2 percent, the Los Angeles Times’s Bill Sing wrote, “It doesn’t help that people in the U.S. are spending like there’s no tomorrow.” Sing’s and Wessel’s assumptions are as bogus as the government statistic on which they’re based. To see why, one need only understand how the government calculates personal savings. Not surprisingly, the calculation is a simplistic one that involves a subtraction of cash outlays from disposable income. David Malpass, NRO Financial...