Of course I can't know for sure, but higher salaries cause higher TV-revenue and merchandise income which is beneficial for the whole league. Also other factors such NT status, home grown rate and global statistics are effecting how economics work in certain leagues. So if you can't pay as high salaries as you want, you can partially blame other teams in the league.
But it's also important to know that e.g. in Finland, most of the teams have tanked several seasons to collect money before they started building their teams and now they are making loss every week. Then after few seasons when their team is starting to decline and all saved money is lost, teams will sell all players and start a new cycle.