you guys got any tips on how to build a good city and dealing with taxes everytime i try to build a city i dont know what to do with the taxes or how to use them

Honestly you can hold your taxes pretty firmly near their default rate or raise them a bit. True to life, people will always complain about taxes. You could lower your taxes down to 2% and people will still be complaining about your outrageously high taxes. When a petitioner asks you for lower taxes, you can and should show them the door. If money is tight, don't be afraid to raise taxes; it will stunt your growth a bit, but you can't grow if you don't have cash so it hardly matters. As with most Simcity games, the start is by far the most challenging part and a small city will struggle to stay solvent. You want to grow as voraciously as possible, because a big city can easily be profitable.

For public transit, subways are the way to go. Rail lines are incredibly efficient early on, but they scale terribly as your city grows. Rail lines have only limited capacity so as you continue to build up you will need to run multiple lines, and all the rail crossings that will entail will absolutely murder your road traffic. Subways are the only real option in the long-run. Strangely enough, subway connections to neighboring cities are also strictly superior to airports. They have exactly the same effect with lower cost, don't take up very many tiles, don't lower nearby land values, and don't cause pollution. It's actually kinda silly, but it works.

Now to address the late-game economic depression... the sad truth about SC3K is that there's an oversight in the way they designed the population demographics that makes retirees into economy-killing monsters. Basically retirees count as "unemployed" people, so even though you may have lots of available jobs they will depress residential demand and people won't immigrate to your city to fill those jobs. This can throw you into a permanent economic depression from which you have no civilized means of escaping. The only real solution is to lower health care spending every so often to purge your senior population.

Which one?

Is there a mod or a tweak out there that can rebalance retired sims that you know of?

Also sorry to double post, but there's a video of a City Planner playing Sim City 2000. Its not 3000 but it might help to give you an idea on how to structure your city. The important thing is also to make sure not to build too many services at once and whenever you take out loans you should only spend them on critical things and to increase your income so you can pay that loan back.

Here's the video in question: https://youtu.be/LUQaCoxybW8

No way, seriously?

Yup. Ideally you just keep your health care spending a little on the low side to prevent the problem from every building up, but if you do run with maximum health care for decades you'll get a demographic glut of seniors. When you lower health care spending to kill them off your RCI will skyrocket as young immigrants to your city replace the dying seniors, leading to a massive economic boom.

Went from population of 330,000 to 130,000. Education/health, police funding maxed out. Rail, subway, roads funding maxed with adequate stations/bus stops. Almost all ordnances enacted. Adequate schools/colleges/hospitals/jails. No over crowding.
Population rose to 220,000 and is holding fairly steady. But now I'm losing money like you wouldn't believe.
I can't figure it out, but short of a bug, there's something I'm not doing right and I have no idea.

Is this what you are referring to? Do I need to cut my health funding?

Definitely possible. The big giveaway that this is your problem is that you have low RCI demand despite having low tax rates. Try lowering health care spending and raising taxes and see if it helps.