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!

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

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

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?

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.

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?