National debt tops $16 trillion

The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the national debt had topped $16 trillion, the result of chronic government deficits that have poured more than $50,000 worth of red ink onto federal ledgers for every person in the United States.

The milestone, reached Friday, was greeted with a round of news releases from President Obama's GOP rivals, who used it to criticize the president for the government's fiscal performance over his 3 1/2 years in office. Obama has presided over four years of trillion dollar-plus deficits after inheriting a weak economy from his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said: "This debt will not only be a liability for our kids and grandkids, but economists also tell us that it will limit economic growth and kill millions of jobs now and in the future." Portman was a member of last year's failed supercommittee in Congress that deadlocked over taxes and cuts to popular benefit programs.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Virgil Goode, the presidential nominee for the conservative Constitution Party, qualified Tuesday for Virginia's ballot in November, complicating Mitt Romney's chances of winning the swing state.

The Virginia State Board of Elections announced that Goode's name would appear third on the ballot, following the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees.

At the same time, the board asked Kenneth Cuccinelli, the state's Republican attorney general, to investigate Republican allegations that Goode's party used fraudulent signatures to qualify for the election.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine appealed a ruling by a U.S. judge that threw out a Republican- backed law that cut three days of early voting for most of the state's citizens.

U.S. District Judge Peter Economus in Columbus ruled Friday in a lawsuit brought by Obama for America that Ohio can't give members of the military and citizens living abroad three days more than other voters to cast ballots. He ordered the previous schedule restored, which allowed anyone to vote until the day before an election.

DeWine, a Republican, filed a one-paragraph notice of appeal of the decision to the federal appeals court in Cincinnati on Tuesday. Jon Husted, Ohio's secretary of state, joined the appeal, DeWine said in the filing.

BLOOMBERG NEWS

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan defended himself against lingering questions about the accuracy of his recent statements on the closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wis., President Obama's handling of debt reduction and his time for running a marathon.

"What they are trying to suggest is that I said that Barack Obama was responsible for a plant shutdown in Janesville," he added. "That is not what I was saying. Read the speech. What I was saying is the president ought to be held to account for his broken promises. After our plant was shut down, he said that he would lead an effort to retool plants like the Janesville plant to get people back to work. It's still idle."

On the debt plan that failed in Congress, "I didn't think it actually fixed the problem of runaway health care entitlement spending. I authored and passed through the House an alternative," Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said. "The president didn't do that."

"About my marathon you said?" Ryan said, laughing. "I literally thought that that was my time. It was 22 years ago. You forget sort of these things."