I've thought about these ideas and honestly it seems hopeless. If a team has 30, 40+ million there would have to be such an obscene tax % it would create all kinds of other issues. The imbalance has been created and ignored, there's not really any easy solution at this point.
I don't love the idea of a cap, but its interesting. FWIW, im running close to 1m payroll and losing at most 100k per week. When you get to the 1.25m+ range it gets beyond the point that its feasible for most teams to even try to compete. That would be the range I'd consider a cap, maybe a soft cap with a hard 1.5m cap after that. Those just seem like good round numbers. If a good 800-1m range team, run reasonably fiscally sound operations, makes a run to the knockouts its feasible to consider adding a player for the stretch run, which happens a lot in real life.
"Well, no ones gonna top that." - http://tinyurl.com/noigttt