Show HN: Interactive California Budget (By Claude Code)

Show HN: Interactive California Budget (By Claude Code)(california-budget.com)

39 points by sberens 102 days ago | 20 comments

There's been a lot of discussion around the california budget and some proposed tax policies, so I asked claude code to research the budget and turn it into an interactive dashboard.

Using async subagents claude was able to research ~a dozen budget line items at once across multiple years, adding lots of helpful context and graphs to someone like me who was starting with little familiarity.

It still struggles with frontend changes, but for research this probably 20-40x's my throughput.

Let me know any additional data or visualizations that would be interesting to add!

bradlys 102 days ago |

Can you explain the 8B YOY increase in higher education for 23-24 to 24-25? It doesn't add up anywhere in the subcategories either. It's just magically 8B higher. It actually went down 0.4B if you add the subcategories.

A giant red flag here... That's half the net budget deficit. So... might want to explain it.

eitally 102 days ago | |

There was a one-time appropriation change that wasn't part of the standard budget creation process.

https://edsource.org/2026/newsoms-last-budget-as-governor-wo...

Essentially, the AI economy has massively increased expected 2025 tax rolls.

irishcoffee 102 days ago |

Can this be backdated any further? This is neat. It would be really interesting to know if 2023 looked like 2033 in 2013, if that makes sense.

codybontecou 126 days ago |

Give Anthropic’s frontend design skill a try. I find it helps Claude produce excellent UI’s.

sberens 102 days ago | |

I did use it for this project! While the UI was good, there was a lot of last mile debugging to make charts/animations/responsiveness work well.

bix6 102 days ago |

Corporation taxes feel pitiful compared to personal income taxes. Why can’t it be flipped?

brownkonas 101 days ago |

I am curious how money received by CA from federal grants are accounted for in this analysis.

jasonriddle 102 days ago |

Thanks for making this. Is the code for this available somewhere public?

kyboren 102 days ago |

Great tool!

First: Are these constant dollars? Or nominal dollars? Maybe there should be a toggle?

Second: I suggest you extend the historical time horizon by a decade, as it will help to demonstrate how Prop. 98 and the insane rise of K-12 spending have totally fucked our budget.

Now it looks like Medi-Cal, services for intellectually disabled people, and "Other HHS programs" will fuck our budget even harder in the coming decade.

Finally: I suggest adding per-beneficiary metrics for all services, where possible. How has the K-12 spending per pupil changed? How will developmental services spending per disabled person change? How much has Medi-Care spending risen per enrolled person?

xenadu02 102 days ago | |

Need historical data for comparison and percentages would make it nicer.

K-12 spending: the same dilemma afflicting everywhere. Despite spending more dollars not getting an equivalent return. Yet teachers are not raking it in. The money is disappearing somewhere. Is it similar to university level: top-heavy administration? Excessive spending on facilities?

I don't know where these estimates are coming from. They seem high. Sometimes an investment in services pays off long-term. CA's cuts to early childhood services only ends up with a bigger bill down the road as more kids fall off and end up either needing help later or getting into trouble.

But I agree with you: in all these areas how much are we spending, in adjusted dollars, per beneficiary and what are the outcomes? If possible how much "overhead" exists in each program? I suspect there is a lot of fat to be trimmed in these areas as admin/management gobbles up bigger slices of the pie while delivering nothing of value. You can see this writ small in San Francisco housing programs. Quite a number of non-profits that claim to be about housing, sucking up funding, then a) opposing all new housing where they don't get to wet their beak b) not actually putting a single person in a home.

johnsmith1840 102 days ago |

I guess I'm ignorant but why do we continue overspending worldwide?

Like do these groups all have heavy metrics about how budget is growing so we actually know anything is in balance here?

I guess I've never seen proper studies around:

"We project tax revenue will grow X amount with this level of confidence therefore we know we can consistently be within Y range of debt growth forever safely"

Or are we all just hoping we all die before someone has to comes in and cuts services spending in half?

jezzamon 102 days ago | |

I think you're already getting at the "why", which for many situations you can view it as a leveraged investment. This site shows education as the biggest expenditure, and there's some argument about that resulting in an overall return on investment. If that is really the case then there's a large opportunity cost in not overspending.

The analysis is not always done sufficiently (or without bias) but that's the idea.

johnsmith1840 102 days ago | | |

Sure but that's kinda my point. If they did this analsysis why isn't it blasted everywhere?

I've never seen a politician mention this kind of (we spend x for y returns) discussion or a doc on it holistically.

It's obvious to most people to invest money can give you more in return but that's not really discussed except peicemeal for one program at a time.

xienze 102 days ago | |

> I guess I'm ignorant but why do we continue overspending worldwide?

Social programs are popular with voters (well, the ones who benefit from them without paying sticker price), no one ever wants to take a step backwards in lifestyle (especially government employees), and there’s an unwavering belief that any amount of spending is “fine”, all we need are those damned rich people to pay their fair share.

saagarjha 102 days ago | | |

Lots of Californians do not benefit from social programs but support them anyway.

maxwellsdeamons 102 days ago |

lol, did Garry Tan code this?