SimCity always had. . .issues. In the OG game(SNES), all a gamer had to do to make the population not hate the player because of taxes was not to build anything that would normally require taxes. No roads, no police, nothing that would require a tax of some kind no matter how small. . .and the NPC's happiness went up.
Here that spinning sound in the distance? That's every Black slave, civil rights worker who risked limb and life in the deep south, and victim of the KKK all spinning in their graves.