I thought I’d post a link to this video here, its me (the developer) talking about the game…
youtu.be/7IErmmSwWFg
…Curses, I’ve been found out!
Max strength Carbon Tax is currently my ‘get out of jail’ card for pretty much every economic difficulty. Which, on reflection, probably supports the idea that it needs weakening 
I just had a thought regarding people just playing the UK and complaining that it’s easy. Would it be a really simple fix just to have each country’s description include something that said ‘Country Difficulty: Easy/Medium/Hard’? That way people would see the UK was intended to be an easy country and might try out the USA or Australia?
Just a thought,
-El