Question about taxes

[Ed_Lane885 0]

Ok so i have 2 big citys and sady i had to keep increasing my taxes to keep ontop of making money instead of going into the negitives per in-game hour. I want to get my taxes down from around 18 to like 9 or something what is the best ways? both citys currently have about 560k each if that helps.

 

 

Im tired of them both bitching about taxes.

[Monster's Cat 120]

Try cutting your expenses, take out the expenses that you don't need anymore like a hospital when there are only around 15 patients, and put a clinic there instead. Stuff like that...

[tnobles 38]

Without specialities, the only way I can run in the red with normal taxes (8-10) is with a balanced RCI. Use the population window and the details tab and try to ballance unemployed, unfilled jobs and shoppers.

[12thDoctor 14]

Essentially, you need to either increase your income from other means or decrease your expenses.

 

So it's worth noting you can tax low wealth ($)  higher than medium- ($$) and high- ($$$) without complaints... I think you can go as high as 11%-10%-9% ($-$$-$$$) or even 12-11-10 before they will begin to complain. (I believe this holds true across all RCI.) 

 

Some ways to increase income without a lot of city specialization (since, with 500k populations, I assume remaining free space is somewhat limited): 

+ Assuming you have the police coverage for it, you could add a couple or few gambling halls spread around the city. 

+ Adding a tourist attract or two to your city (each attraction generates income for each sim visiting per hour, so you can easily generate +$10k-15k/day income, per attraction.) 

+ Adding an Expo Center or Stadium will generate income from events held there.

+ Building a Recycling Center. Bulldoze the Plastic Reclamation line that comes standard with it and add three Alloy or Metal lines--whichever has better export prices--then build a Trade port, bulldoze the Freight storage that comes standard with the building, add one or two lots for whichever resource your Recycling line is producing, and set the resource to "Export." After the first recycling center is built in the city, there will gradually be less and less garbage generated per building and more recyclables. This is a double-whammy because it requires less garbage dump capacity (requiring fewer expenses on garbage service) and increases the amount of resources produced (and thereby exported) by the Recycling Center.

+ Industry (the RCI-kind): Industry actually generates a good deal of tax income so they may be worthwhile incorporating. Pollution shouldn't be much of an issue if you have a Community College or University in your city and put the Industry down-wind from any Residential areas. The negative land-value effects can be offset with a few $-wealth parks between them and any residential buildings. 

 

Ways to decrease expenses:

- Education: Having a high education level in the city makes a huge impact, here... especially at a 500k population. It's definitely a long-term type of investment--especially if you haven't really maintained education levels up to this point--but at higher education levels you have fewer crimes and criminals (requiring fewer police), fewer fires (requiring fewer fire stations), stay healthier and are less likely to be injured (requiring fewer hospitals/clinics/ambulances) and also recycle more (requiring less garbage expenses and increases the amount of resources produced/exported by the Recycling Center. 

--- With education, the type of education doesn't matter... you don't need Elementary Schools & High Schools & a University, nor do you need any of the lower-level education buildings over the higher level ones...

-- With 500k populations you probably won't want any Elementary Schools (ES) because they have a higher expense-to-capacity ratio than a High School (HS). And a HS also takes up less space since you can stack every one of the add-on classroom modules on top of the main building so a full-capacity HS only takes up a single HD-building tile (ignoring the Gymnasium add-on because, last time i checked, it didn't actually add additional capacity despite its description).  

-- It is also possible to meet all of your city's education needs using only Community College or University, too... however, for you, the biggest factors determining whether to go with high schools or a University will be: A.) The space to build it (Universities require a much more area) and B.) traffic. High Schools have school buses that will dispatch and pick up students... but with Universities, students have to travel there themselves (via walking, mass transit, driving, etc.). Classes are spread out throughout the day (6:00, 9:00, 12:00, 3:00, I believe) so a single University will create a great deal more traffic throughout the day than several high schools would. Just something to keep in mind. 

- Police Precincts, Large Fire Stations, and Hospitals aren't always the best solutions... particularly if you aren't able to afford the costs. As MatthewB13 with Hospitals/Clinics: if they aren't well-used or anywhere near their capacities, you probably want to get rid of them in favor of a few dispersed smaller versions. 

- Individual ploppables/modules can be turned off independently from the main building... so if you have a police station with a lot of cars that aren't needed (zoom in and look at how many of the cars are in the lots vs. the number of empty stalls), you don't have to bulldoze them in order to save money. Enter the building customization mode, select the module, and press the power button to deactivate the module and save some expenses... you can always turn it back on, later, if needed. 

- Purchasing the excess capacity for water/power/sewage from neighbors is far more cost-efficient  (and I mean ridiculously cheaper: a few hundred $/day vs. a couple hundred $/hour.) You don't need to rely on them for all of your requirements, but if there is enough available in your region, you may be able to use that to offset some of your own utilities enough to be able to turn off a few of your own pumps/generators/treatment tanks and purchase utilities from your neighbor to still meet that demand.

- It's a relatively small thing and easy to overlook, but remember that bus stops and school bus stops are $10/hour... but the costs of those can add up quickly. If you have a lot of them--and are desperate to save more money--you can zoom in closely and check the stats for each stop and remove the ones that don't have a lot of riders/day.

- Check the details tab in your population window: Do you have a significant number of people commuting in and out for work and shopping or tourists? If not, you can probably cut down on and turn off some of your inter-city transportation options (regional bus stations, rail stations, etc.). If you have people commuting in but not out then you also don't actually need any regional buses in your own city if your neighbors have a regional bus station. 

- Another expense that, while they are relatively small by themselves, add up quickly are parks... so if you have a lot--or went overkill in any areas--you can shut some of them down to save on expenses. 

 

In general, just look at your budget window and see which areas have the highest expenses... then go back into you city and see what parts and pieces you can afford or stand to shut down or reduce. Specializations aren't necessary... but they certainly help. 

[FourteenRocket 100]

I find the best combination for taxes is keeping Low wealth at 11%, and Medium and High Wealth at about 10%... if you have built the Dept. of Finance early on you could push it to 11% for a few months until Sims abandon buildings from taxes... But you should go no higher than 11% on low wealth and 10% on medium and high for residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. Make sure you keep an eye on your income and turn things off when nessesary. An exception would be if you lost $50,000 an hour but make $600,000 in return from trade  . I got a city to do that from having making computers tvs and processors with selling alloy and metal to boot.

[Xr3iracer 5]

I have found that medium wealth don't seem to mind taxes of 11%. It's hard to keep the hourly rate in the green so iv given up trying in most my cities and rely on the specialisation income!

[infoman96 27]

Ok so i have 2 big citys and sady i had to keep increasing my taxes to keep ontop of making money instead of going into the negitives per in-game hour. I want to get my taxes down from around 18 to like 9 or something what is the best ways? both citys currently have about 560k each if that helps.

Im tired of them both bitching about taxes.

Your tax rate is at 18%? My god, I thought I was being harsh by setting the poor rates at 11%, while the wealthy get a 'hefty' 3%. But deficits are ok on this game for the most part as long as you have other sources of income.

I have one city, which I consider my best city, that has 11% taxes across the board. At one point the city continually produced $11k an hour surpluses, but once I decided to take down the industrial zone of the city huge budget shortfalls occurred, done as large as -$23k an hour.

After realizing that city could no longer be the main city of the region, I made one city donate $500k, and another take out three bonds to gift to my main city. I shut down city services which included one nuclear reactor that provided power to another city, I closed a casino, shut down one runway at the airport, closed the high school, closed the over-size fire department that had HazMats pointlessly, and I dramatically reduced my police force because it was the largest component of the budget mostly because there is a city directly beside mine that someone abandoned and it's crime runs crazy therefore I need to donate like 12-20 cars at all times to that city.

So essentially what I'm saying is start reducing taxes and cut unecassary services. If I can dig a city out if -$23k deficits hourly that was trying to play a larger role than it needed to play, then you can cut as well.

[duckbow 3]

Below is a graphic from the Maxis blog showing happiness gain/loss from tax rate, by wealth class:

 

 

According to this, to attract High Wealth residents, lowering taxes to 6% would not give High Wealth residents any more incentive than 10% would. Taxes must be lower than 6% for any gains in happiness.

 

Here is the link to the Maxis blog entry about taxes: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-taxes

[12thDoctor 14]

Below is a graphic from the Maxis blog showing happiness gain/loss from tax rate, by wealth class:

 

 

According to this, to attract High Wealth residents, lowering taxes to 6% would not give High Wealth residents any more incentive than 10% would. Taxes must be lower than 6% for any gains in happiness.

 

Here is the link to the Maxis blog entry about taxes: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-taxes

 

That graphic is awesome... I wasn't aware of that blog post.

 

The only thing I wonder, yet--and it isn't quite clear from the dev's post, either--is if the Happiness gained by Low Wealth sims at 1% taxes is the same as at 7%, for example... or does the Happiness gain increase the lower it goes. That would be useful to know because, if it is constant, then basically there are only four tax levels for each wealth you should ever set. For example, with low-wealth, they would be 7%, 12%, 19%, and 20%. If 7% adds as much happiness as 1%, there is no advantage to setting it any lower than 7%. At 12%, happiness is neither lost nor gained, at 19% happiness is lost as much as it would be at 13%, and, as mentioned in the dev blog, 20% is the "exclusion" setting and the point at which no new sims at that wealth level will come into the city. 

 

Maybe somebody would care to test this theory out... 

[CarloTheCurious 3]

I've been fiddling a bit with taxes in a few of my cities in an effort to stop 'Leaving the city' spam, and it seems like progressively higher rates over 13% cause progressively more abandoned buildings. I wasn't tracking actual happiness numbers though, and there might be other factors of course.

[Vladyi 0]

What I am doing is running a deficit of up to $20-40K/hour depending on pop but making it back in exports. I import oil and have 2 refineries for plastic 2 processor factories and 2 TV factories. I can export both TV and processors all the time but normally alternate with plastic between export and use locally. I will easily make several million an hour in real time not game time.

The only problem can be when there is massive traffic jams I can have issues with oil deliveries and that can cause plastic shortages at the factories. Also the delivery trucks can take a while to get back with the cash from the exports but if you lose money it is very slow and often short lived.

[aeon71 0]

What I am doing is running a deficit of up to $20-40K/hour depending on pop but making it back in exports. I import oil and have 2 refineries for plastic 2 processor factories and 2 TV factories. I can export both TV and processors all the time but normally alternate with plastic between export and use locally. I will easily make several million an hour in real time not game time.

The only problem can be when there is massive traffic jams I can have issues with oil deliveries and that can cause plastic shortages at the factories. Also the delivery trucks can take a while to get back with the cash from the exports but if you lose money it is very slow and often short lived.

 

 

 

 

 

I am currently trying to learn how to build underpasses in the roadway. I actually want to try and segregate that particular population of workforce (electronics industry) in a subway style road system that leads from the manufacturer to the trade port. there is a way to dig urself a trench and lay down the roadwork. you then build bridges over them for regular city traffic. but Im having a a hard time learning the technique...