JANUARY 30 / It's true, but pernicious and misleading, to say . . .

. . . that the American government is borrowing 40 cents out of every dollar it spends. A better way to look at this, and to express it, is that the feds are borrowing . . .

. . . 100 cents out of every extra dollar they spend in excess of government revenues.

If you make $75,000 and spend $74,000, you don't have a problem. You have $1,000 left over to put in the bank.

If you make $75,000 and spend $76,000, you must borrow 100 percent of the extra dollars.

To say that you're borrowing only 1.3 percent of what you spend is to minimize the nature of your problem.