How the Hegemony funds its hordes of Theurges, Phalangites, Alastors, Telones, and Ecclesiasts is opaque to pretty much everyone, so you’ve got no idea if it includes a “deficit” or if so, who it’s borrowing from. The increasingly out-of-control spiral of Alastors “self-funding” their office through extortion does however suggest that taxes alone aren’t filling the bucket.
“Employment” as a concept is just becoming relevant to the Hegemony, as it urbanizes and industrializes. (In agrarian societies, and perhaps in post-industrial societies eventually, the vast majority of people don’t have jobs outside the home.) In the cities, as you’ll see, there are lots more people than jobs.
The fiscal load on nobles, merchants, and other legally employed tradesfolk varies widely. The Thaumatarchy is very much an early modern state, for all its precociously totalitarian policing; most of its population is still “illegible” to it, and it struggles to enforce any policy (including tax) consistently across its vast domain. But the tax burden is steadily growing everywhere.
At some (no doubt hotly contested) point, your “stealing” will become “taxing.” Until then, while you remain an illegal force, you can’t really own anything; any investments you made would arguably be either theft or donation.
I’ve promised somewhere else that all three of the rescued characters in the Prologues can reappear, Carles in Game 1 and Olynna and Wolfbait in Game 2.