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!
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?
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.
A giant red flag here... That's half the net budget deficit. So... might want to explain it.
https://edsource.org/2026/newsoms-last-budget-as-governor-wo...
Essentially, the AI economy has massively increased expected 2025 tax rolls.
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?
The analysis is not always done sufficiently (or without bias) but that's the idea.
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.
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.