[HN Gopher] Show HN: Interactive California Budget (By Claude Code)
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Show HN: Interactive California Budget (By Claude Code)
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!
Author : sberens
Score : 21 points
Date : 2026-02-04 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (california-budget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (california-budget.com)
| codybontecou wrote:
| Give Anthropic's frontend design skill a try. I find it helps
| Claude produce excellent UI's.
| sberens wrote:
| 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.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| 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?
| xienze wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Lots of Californians do not benefit from social programs but
| support them anyway.
| xienze wrote:
| Do they have a choice?
| kyboren wrote:
| 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?
| jasonriddle wrote:
| Thanks for making this. Is the code for this available somewhere
| public?
| bradlys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2026-02-04 23:00 UTC)