I personally don't really like the idea of making non government employees useless. While it fixes the issue of a non TN China having ridiculous wealth generation I think it would negatively impact civilian wealth generation colonies in the later game.
They aren't useless. Just outside the scope of the decisions in the game
This is what i mean in terms of useless. They provide no real game play effect. With respect, i see a major problem with your proposal.
In your proposed system, income comes from 2 sources. Government mines, refineries and financial centres, and civilian traders and mining complexes.
Realistically, no one is going to build more mines or refineries than they need just for a bit of wealth, and you have no real control over civilians aside from stopping them being shot down and establishing colonies. Therefore, the only real game choice when facing a lack of financing is build more financial centres. While there are some more nuanced options, it will basically always come down to that.
My proposal is instead that wealth generation continues to be completely from the private sector and Financial centres. In addition to my change earlier in the thread I would suggest re-examining the way population is assigned to jobs. In VB6 there are 4 populations. 1- Agriculture and environment 2- Service sector 3- Unemployed government 4 -Employed government.
I would suggest merging populations 2 and 3. The worker pool able to be drawn on would be every worker not in the critical agriculture and environment sector, which has to be fulfilled, and should probably be expanded slightly to all critical tasks. No one is just sat around doing nothing as in VB6, people either work privately or for the government. But as wealth (Which can be abstracted as the fulfillment of the populations needs) is generated only by the private sector and Financial centers, this forms the limit of the workers available to you.
If we look at the same scenario of being low on cash, we have some more options. We could as above build Financial centres, effectively nationalising parts of our commercial sector, increasing their efficiency. Or we could instead spend that production boosting the development of some of our colonies to increase the productivity of our civilian sector. Or we could shift some of our heavy industry to a less developed world, leaving more population free to work privately on our developed capital, giving us a net increase in productivity. And of course long term shipping people off world will be a short term loss, but the population growth will lead to eventual returns on that investment.