Slitherine

As the sign says..the tax scale is kinda hidden at the bottom of the econ page and doesnt stand out. I dont think there is a starting tip suggesting you tinker with it. Maybe it should be made more obvious.

Any good suggestions?

Make each city have it's own tax rate.

Since the growth controls were removed, this might prove useful for morale balancing. Not to mention, it's also realistic.

It would make it very micro-ey.

That's true. But at this point, I hardly touch the taxes. It's not that I forget about them, I just don't bother messing with it unless I need a sudden morale boost... but I still shy away from that because it screws with my credit income too bad. I personally would use the city-specific tax system, but I understand why other's would dislike the micromanagement.

Other idea: You know how the diplomacy button is grayed-out at the beginning? I guess another idea would be to have the economy button grayed out at first and then introduce taxes a few turns after the first city is built. I'm imagining a blinking "Choose Tax Rate" on the right side-panel similar to the one that says "Choose Research" or "Choose Production." If the tax isn't selected automatically, the player will have to choose one and experiment to find a sweet spot for his/her faction. This would require them to become familiar with it.

And making it more bold wouldn't hurt either. But it's current state of graphics never bothered me.

I too plus one on this.
I am very adverse to micro-managing and am happy to say that this game is indeed very good at avoiding it.
But I do like the idea of individual tax rate for each city, that is without the population buttons, we can further tune where we want more population. Further more it allows us to fine tune more with each city upkeep.
Of course it would to be easy to change and not intrusive, my suggestion would be sliders added to the city info in the economy tab, and further to increase step size to 10%.

Being able to affect migration is a strong point for it, we'll definitely consider it.

Perhaps for those not wanting to micromanage add a button next to the city tax slider that says "Make Global". That way any time someone wants to change their global rate and not worry about micromanaging cities they can do it from any city screen.

Since some might not appreciate micromanaging, perhaps it could be a pre-game option? Or JeffGeorge's idea.

Also, I think this would make the morale-boosting city enhancements even more enticing because you could tailor a large city for ideal income. Play Noxium, put a city next to gold, build the stock market and its more advanced versions of it, get the morale enhancements that let you get away with higher taxes, and set the tax high. To top it all off, (this wouldn't receive the tax bonuses) you could max out production and just produce wealth. That would be quite the city of revenue.

We're thinking about adding a city tax rate on top of the global tax rate, so you can manage however you want. Most likely post-release though.