Earning Money

There are a number of ways to earn money, be it either for the empire's treasury for your personal wallet.

Minting

The first step in earning money, is making the currency.

The currency is gold bullion and they are made at a machine shop using metal, magmium, or vulcium.

All the produced bullion goes into the citizen accounts.

Taxation

The main way for an empire to make money is through taxation.

Trading between cities is considered wholesale, and as such is not taxed.

Income Tax

All every time a citizen works a job, it is payed 25¢. This pay is then taxed by the income tax.

Unfortunately once a city's inventory is full, any production processes that produce a commodity which's storage is full will stop being completed and thereby citizens aren't paid for working it.

Subsidized Tax

Subsidy tax is taken every time a subsidized spacecraft makes a trade transaction.

The tax goes into the spacecraft's tax account, then every time an empire city is hailed the ship tax account is transferred to the government account of that city.

A high subsidy tax is preferred when using a harvester bay equipped spacecraft, since it minimizes the need to board the spacecraft and manually empty the ship account. Even a subsidy tax of 100% can be useful for this.

Alternate Incomes

Harvester

Setting up automated spacecraft with harvester bays can be very profitable. Making them harvest resources and sell them to cities.

Especially profitable for advanced and rare resources.

Personal Wallet

Filling your personal wallet is required in order to trade with cities and other empire.

Mayor's Money

Being in control of a city allows you to withdraw money from the city's government account directly into your own pocket.

Jobs

Owning a spacecraft (preferably a private one) allows you to preform jobs from the Jobs (F9) window.

Jobs pay extra for transporting commodities to other cities, along with other types of jobs like bounty hunting and pirate elimination.