u/FraffoD

There are a lot of things you can do to improve your economy in this game. Sometimes when you think about crown power, trade power, tax, wealth, RGO, and buildings, tax efficiency ecc. It can be a bit confusing to decide what to do, also because strategies require time to be implemented. So in this post, I want to just focus on the spread between wealth and tax base

Indeed, if I have to think about the fastest way to improve your balance situation is just to reduce the spread between tax base and wealth. Wealth is the simple sum of the wealth produced by all your provinces; the tax base is what you are able to tax of that wealth. Wealth is also mainly responsible for your expenses going higher and higher. If the spread between your wealth and your tax base is high, you will have high expenses and a low income.

Here is an example of how reducing wealth can sometimes improve your income

At the start of the game, the wealth of England is 300% its tax base, and if we max out the expenses, our balance is horrible. This is because most of the provinces are below 30 control, and we get very few tax bases out of these provinces

Now the most effective way to improve the situation here would be to create vassals (decrease wealth, handing off provinces with low control) and build local governors (increase tax base without increasing wealth). But what if you cannot do these two things? Well, you can just delete/close all the buildings and downgrade RGOS in the provinces where you have less than 30-40 control

As you can see here, just deleting RGOS and building in my low control provinces has cut my negative balance by 40%. This is because I reduced the spread between wealth and tax base; now, wealth is only 200% of the tax base, making my situation way better.

Then, of course, you can do the usual stuff (improve crown power, try to improve proximity, etc.) But this is something you can do very quickly and also teaches you the importance of not RGO maxing blindly.