its just based on the fact you get population bonusus for having a certian moral level is all. i target 100% but ill settle for 75%. and since they changed the population growth in 1.1 its actualy importiant to concider now how fast your population grows. I don't understand, what do you mean it's your weakest link? True in your example Earth would have the lowest morale, but so what? Just build morale improvements there if you really care. I wouldn't. if you try to keep earth at a reasonable moral level then all your other smaller pop planets are under taxed to fund earths moral. and adding moral boosters is not allways a viable answer since there are huge moral hits for over crounding and moral buildings just cant keep up. the hits grow faster than the bonusus do after a certian pop point. if it was to be fixed then all planets tax rate would be able to be set on an individual basis. that way you could have 20 billion people on earth with a 49% tax rate and 15 billion people on skybow 3 with a 69% tax rate. the game is just set up odd in my opinion. you either have to over tax your large planets or under tax your medium, or do as i do and keep all your planets about the same population so you can max taxes empire wide. to really see this in action , the next time you get a tripple food tile on your home world, use it. put a farm on it and see how huge the moral differences can be from a large population plant to a mid size planet can get due to over crouding. to keep earth at even 50% moral your taxes have to be at less than 30% or you have to build nothing but moral boosters along with that one farm. it makes all the farm bonus tiles almost worthless. since the way the tax system works you cant really adjust to the differences between low pop worlds and high pop worlds. your either over taxing or under taxing. in my opinion the tax rates should either be adjustable on each individual planet (like moral is now), or the moral should NOT be based on each individual planet but rather empire wide (like the tax rate is now).

It's MORALE not MORAL.

One of the best things to keep the AI at bay is on any planet that you can build 3-4 food farms do it. What I generally try to do for building up a planet is the following..

3 -4 Farms
Starport
2 Factories up to 5 factories if possible
3 Research
1 - 2 trade centers
2 Happiness buildings

The farms are key to getting alot of people on your planets fast don't worry about happiness much just keep your approval rating at 54 or more. once you've gotten about 12 colonies started your research should allow you to already be able to build defenders ( and thunders especially) on all your planets. Generally by the time that I have reached 7 planets I'm already getting gifts from races because I outnumber them. in my current game there are 5 other civs discovered so far ( everything is randomed..) the largest one is like 179647 voters I'm already sitting pretty with 588,341 voters. I just now started putting the defenders and now the thunders into my planets for defense. traveled the route up to democracy, massive hulls, Expert Logistics, Graviton II ( going for my Shredder now.. ) Then I'll research the alignment thingy and go Evil ( so I can get my Shredder) and lay waste to the Civs that are too small to compete. All the while I keep getting these 500bc - 1500bc gifts from the smaller races because I have not swatted them out of the cosmos.. this all done with just 1 trade route because before I outnumbered them they did that stupid vote to limit evil races trade. Wish we could revote on issues. I think that I am powerful enuff to actually leave the U. P. but that says you can no longer use trade ( not that it matters in this instance but I don't know if that also means I can't trade with the minor races yet.. never tested that out...)
I've have made maybe 3 planets primarily Embassy Planets with 3 - 4 embassy's each. Once I have my Shredder I'll go after the Point Defense stuff and finallly planet invasion.

But it really seems to look like if you outnumber them with people your going to be safe from them at least untill they get over the fear factor.

Thank you for all the comments. I located a number of mistakes was making First. I went back to the tutorial. I discovered that the production bar was based on 100% production. I had thought that since it defaulted to 50% that that was normal production and anything over that was overdriving the economy, costing me a lot of money. Of course now I realize that the reason everyone else was producing and researching so fast was that I was functioning at half my production rate. Fixed that for sure.

I have also adjusted my military. Though I still paly a bit on the defensive side, I have ships tootling about as a show of force.
I am also using freighters to boost my income.

As far as the cheating goes. I upgraded to 1.1 and it appears to have stopped, or I did not notice it. One of the things I was noticing was that the AIs were making capitols. The problem was that they did not have the tech to produce them.

That all said my current game is going well, and I am again in an influence battle with the torians, but I will take care of them ...

Yeah, like p22 said other races have different starting techs and can, if they wish, build capitals on week one.

And in 1.1 normal got dumbed down, but it never cheated. You're now cheating it even more