Since the end of 2009, we’ve averaged about 120,00 jobs per month. Over the past six months, job growth has slowed to 97,000 per month.

In the face of ballooning federal budget deficits, people have been wondering how the Clinton surpluses evaporated. Indeed, between 1998 and 2001 and for the first time in decades, the U.S. budget was balanced. Using Congressional Budget Office data, these two charts—modified from the ones made by Charles Blahous in his e21 piece “How Did Federal Surpluses Become Huge Deficits?”—provide some answers to this question.

This chart uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Tables to show the number of jobs gained during each presidential tenure since 1945. The chart shows the historical record of how presidents rank against each other by number of jobs gained and the unemployment rate.

Four out of every five dollars in the currently debated bill—roughly $80 billion per year—will be spent on groceries bought with food stamps for one in every seven Americans. An estimated 45 million Americans received food stamps in 2011 at a cost of $78 billion. That’s a two-fold increase from just five years ago, when 26 million people received benefits at a cost of $33 billion.